Ask Lemmy

There are a lot of good sellers of corporate leasebacks out there... A five year old ThinkPad is going to kick butt over anything new with a Celeron. I'm a student, and I got an MSI workstation with an i7-9750H, 16GB RAM, 256GB NVME, and a garbage battery for 250$ CAD. That's less than 200$ USD.

The best advice here is to just not buy new. You can get a refurbished laptop from trusted sellers that will definitely exceed the requirements for under $200. If you are willing to spend up to $300 then there is literally no concerns.

For example here is a DELL Latitude 7490 Laptop Intel Core i5 8th Gen 8250U (1.60GHz) 16GB Memory 256 GB SSD Intel UHD Graphics 620 14.0" Windows 10 Pro for $192 on Newegg.

https://www.newegg.com/dell-latitude-7490-work-business/p/N82E16834833592?item=N82E16834833592

If you don't like Newegg there are tons of other stores that offer refurbished laptops. I assume you are in the USA and stores you can consider are Target, Walmart, Best buy.

There is very little risk with refurbished laptops. They are usually tested before being shipped out and if you buy from a legit company they usually offer some kind of store warranty. Walmart for example offers a 90 day return policy for any reason.

It's hard to make suggestions on which laptop to get since availability plays a bigger role here. So just look around at your desired budget and pick what you think your kid needs.

If you think your kid won't accept a laptop that has a scratch, simply look for "As New". Then there usually aren't any visible damages. But if you are fine with some cosmetic damage you can get real bargains.

My suggestion? Some old ThinkPad. I was using a T420s for several years for online college classes. I have since moved onto a T480s.

Just looked on eBay. A refurb T470 is around $140USD and a new battery on Am*zon (if you are okay with Jeff Bozo, I am not) is less than $30. So you have two batteries that you can swap out for decent time away from an outlet and a semi recent laptop with 8GB RAM and an SSD for low power consumption.

I can PM you links if you want.

Important edit: some ThinkPads don't have webcams! I don't know if your kid needs to video chat for school, I know my sister had to. Make sure whatever you order had a webcam – they aren't always present!

As a guy that works at a repair store, used laptops are insanely cheap. You'll get a much more powerful and capable laptop if you go used, and you're not at any risk because many reputable sellers and refurbishers will provide warranties too.

Most importantly when looking on eBay for laptops you want an SSD, if it says it's using an HDD or "hard drive" avoid it. SSDs are 6x faster or more than HDDs and are much more reliable in mobile devices. They are cheap now too and most quality refurbs will have an SSD in most of their devices.

A lot of SSDs are somewhat low capacity so make sure she gets a little more storage than what she needs right now, but also external storage is pretty effective if the laptop's storage gets a little full.

Other important features. 1080 HD screen. This will be really nice to have and often means that the processor on the laptop is pretty decent too for day to day tasks (most modern CPUs on many computers are far more powerful than most people ever need).

8gb or preferably 16gb of RAM. A lot of new computers today have a lot of RAM, which now means software devs are a lot lazier optimizing their programs. More RAM nowadays is really important and for good longevity I highly recommend 16gb.

Availability of parts. If you're interested in a laptop, open a new eBay tab and put in "laptop model number parts". If you see an abundance of cheap parts available that's a very good sign. This means repairs are not only possible but likely easy and cheap.

Additionally feel free to ask questions, if you see a laptop that's great but lacks a bit of ram, or has an SSD a little too small you can ask the seller to upgrade it. It's gonna cost a little but shouldn't be much. Unfortunately screens and processors (in most cases!) cannot be upgraded and usually not worth asking.

A few more notes.

Look at the reputation of the seller and usually if they specialize in only laptops that's a good sign.

Additionally avoid really poorly made laptops, I usually avoid most HP laptops because they have the rigidity of a wet newspaper and break all the damn time. We get a lot of them for repair and it's labour intensive and expensive. Some dells are just as bad so be careful.

Most of the time Thinkpads are pretty solid little machines and have pretty good build quality. Additionally if you want something to last it's worth looking at business and professional machines, many consumer grade ones suck.

A specific seller I have bought from are "PC Server & Parts". They have a free 90 day warranty and good customer service, their prices are also very competitive too. I would recommend looking at their website too (true for many eBay sellers) since the prices may be cheaper (eBay charges a fee to sellers).

I'd suggest looking at one of the slightly older Surface Pro units. They are cheap and I love them.

If the notebook let's you upgrade the ram and ssd, then you can just buy a 4-core (or more) notebook. I recommend AMD for better battery performance

4GB ram with Windows11 is going to be practically unusable. Even for Windows 7 4GB would be rough just for basic browsing and Zoom. Installing older Windows on a laptop is possible and generally pretty easy, but you might to check there win7 drivers available for the hardware. I don't think it's worth it with laptop specs you provided though.

I recently got a second hand mid 2012 Macbook Pro for roughly 150 USD. I live in a third world country and I would call that a good deal. It has 8GB ram, 250GB SSD. 3rd gen Intel CPU but gets the job done.

I use PhotoShop very much, besides school work. You can maybe find something similar on eBay.

Dolar store

Edit: Spyro