So my spouse is going back to university to finish her degree. She starts this week. Seeing as her old laptop is 10 years old and slow AF, we determined that she needed a new one.
With a potential budget of less than $500, our options weren't looking good. Sub $500 laptops are crappily built, have terrible screens, keyboards and trackpads, and even worse internals. And you can forget about getting anything with an SSD or 64-bit operating system for that price.
Then, somebody recommended that I look at a refurbished business laptop from
https://ca.refurb.io/. They sell refurbished business machines, including laptops. You can option increased amounts of RAM, as well as SSD's (for maximum snappiness).
So, for $376 delivered to our door, we got a Lenovo Thinkpad T430, with a 14" 1366x768 display (that's the low point of the laptop), i5 3320m processor (dual core with hyper-threading), 8GB of RAM, 128GB SSD. It took about a week to deliver after ordering.
The laptop showed up in excellent condition. It was marketed as Grade A, which is apparently the best. There are no visible scratches or marks, and the keys don't seem to have much wear on them. The rubber pads on the bottom all look like they've been replaced. The laptop is impeccably clean. It came with a fresh install of Windows 10 Pro 64-bit (included when you option up to the 8GB of RAM). The only bloatware included was McAfee. I immediately banished all traces of McAfee and replaced it with Malwarebytes, my favorite anti-malware and virus detector. The battery still held approximately 8 hours of use from a full charge - not bad for a 4 year old laptop (they could hold 14-15hrs of charge when new). With the SSD, it boots to the Windows log-on screen in about 15 seconds. Loading programs within Windows is almost instantaneous. It only has 128GB of storage, but we'll be buying Microsoft Office which comes with 1TB of OneDrive storage, so mass storage won't be an issue (I also have 10TB of storage on my HTPC at home). The priority for this laptop was responsiveness, not mass-storage.
The laptop is classic Thinkpad. These things were $1200-$1600 when new, and they feel it. They're not the lightest or thinnest laptops, but they are very rugged. The materials are high quality, and chassis flex is almost non-existent. The keyboard feels excellent and is very accurate. The trackpad is almost Apple-like in its consistency and accuracy. The only shortcoming of the laptops were the screens. The 1366x768 TN-panel screens were not very good. BUT, for a business/school machine, picture quality is down on the list of priorities. It's 'good enough'. This is a machine that will be used primarily for internet research and document creation.
Overall, I have to say I am VERY impressed with our purchase. For the price ($376 all in!!!!!), I really don't think we could have done any better. The computer enthusiast in me is very happy (what's not to like about an Ivy-Bridge processor), as is the miser in me (did I mention $376 all-in???) I won't hesitate to recommend
https://ca.refurb.io/ to anyone who needs to buy a laptop on a budget, and who doesn't mind a refurbished unit.
