Looking to get my son his first laptop. I think i have narrowed it down to a refurbished lenovo x250/t450 as they seem robust/ upgradeable and repairable.

The last laptop i had was a dell  running vista so i am out of touch on modern laptops and struggling with RAM and SSD sizes.

Do STW experts think he will get away with 4gb ram and 128ssd( and save me some money at about £200). He will have cloud storage and no big files as he is only in secondary school.  My thoughts were if he runs out of RAM or ssd space he can upgrade it down the line if he wants. But i have read that windows and its updates will use a large chunk of this memory, so do i need to really spend another £80/100 (nearer £300) and just go 8gb/256ssd from the off? Also, more of a concern is, buying refurbished can i just upgrade the ssd etc or will this cause me problems with windows if the laptop does not come with a windows ‘key’, (some i am looking at dont mention a ‘key’ hence my worry about reinstalling windows in the future).

Thanks

The 128Gb SSD will be ok, unless he’s installing massive games (which that laptop isn’t really suitable for)- in fact, it might help to encourage backups, moving stuff of to something like Google Drive.

However, I would expand the RAM to 8Gb.

For keys, you can buy a legit key from Ebay for about £2:50, so don’t be too concerned.

Good to know about the keys and i should of said that he wont be doing any gaming on it.

I would upgrade the RAM to 8GB, as above really.

+1 for 8GB RAM (I’m guessing that model probably has a GPU that shares the system RAM as well so it wouldn’t even be 4GB available to the OS).

128GB SSD is plenty if not storing much locally but if it’s only a bit more to go for 256GB then might be a wise decision in the long run

256GB would be better. 128 is okay but the problem is the accumulated cruft from Windows updates. It should automatically clear these down, but I’ve seen a few cases now where it doesn’t then gets stuck in a cycle of trying to download updates over and over again.

Honestly if it’s not much more then it’s money well spent to avoid the agro down the line.

I would say to retain the 128Gb SSD and then spend a small amount of money on a spinning rust HDD backup disk that he can actually store stuff on. They are super-cheap and very reliable. It means he will get good performance on the laptop when actually doing stuff, but can still store photos, work, stuff on more than just the SSD.

RAM is always good, 4Gb should be enough for just work though.

I used a 128GB Laptop for years as my secondary device in work. I use even less now, all our data is on OneDrive and my personal stuff on iCloud.

Bare in the mind though that PCs with HDDs are about a popular as dose of clap so they can be bought pretty cheaply, I’m buying 256GB SSDs for about £30 at the moment (trade) and RAM cards for about the same. Some laptops are easier than others to work on, but none are impossible. Sometimes it’s better to buy something cheap and upgrade it.

Do STW experts think he will get away with 4gb ram and 128ssd

That’s really the minimum you would want. It’ll run fine for email, word processing, etc. Personally I would go for 8 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD from the start and be done with it.

You do not need to buy a new Windows key if you want to reinstall. With Win10, the activation process records the specific hardware and registers that. Once it has been activated, you can then wipe it and reinstall Windows without needing to enter a serial number. You can download the Windows installation files from the MS website and create a bootable USB drive, then use that to start from fresh.

The price difference between a 120 and 240 SSD is about five quid. The OS will take up half of a 120GB drive before you’ve started, I’d get the 240 as a minimum. 4GB is ample (though I’d want one 4GB stick in there rather than two 2GB SODIMMS for future upgrade purposes).

Licence key is a non-issue as hols2 said. Even if it dosen’t come with a W10 licence it should have a W7 / W8.1 COA sticker on it which you can use to activate W10.

Thanks everyone. Looks like a lenovo t450 256ssd/8gb ram for £230 it is then. I am tempted to get myself one too……

TBH it’s hard to beat at that price, the Lenovo T-series are forged in the fires of Mordor. Where are you getting it from? Cheapest I can find for a refurb T450 to that spec is North of £300.

I Am in Ireland cougar and there is a refurb place here that has one, looks clean too.

Cougar

Subscriber

TBH it’s hard to beat at that price, the Lenovo T-series are forged in the fires of Mordor. Where are you getting it from? Cheapest I can find for a refurb T450 to that spec is North of £300.

8 gb / 240 gb / i5-5300u grade 2 refurb £249

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Lenovo-Thinkpad-T450-Core-i5-5300U-2-30GHz-16GB-Ram-240GB-SSD-Windows-10-Laptop/232949763168?hash=item363ce34c60:m:mK_WyaaWMkC3pfUI-xvwhDA

T450s rock.

128 is just enough if using OneDrive as then you can shove everything offline if you want without having to mess around a lot.  256 is better though

As above, definitely consider investing in a regular HDD for files. SSD space disappears surprisingly quickly, especially once you factor in things like Office etc; and having all your files and docs on a separate drive makes things like reinstalling Windows *much* easier.

Who wants to carry round an HDD though?

A 480gb ssd can be had for under 50 notes, or ~1tb for under 80.

and having all your files and docs on a separate drive makes things like reinstalling Windows *much* easier.

Or office365 with OneDrive.  No need for the HDD (although I still ocassionally back everything up to it but probably only once a year)