I am retiring my Dell M6600 in favour of something (much!) more portable. I’m looking for something used at around £300. Needs 16GB of RAM and decent battery life. Only really used for general office work and admin on the go. Any suggestions?
Don’t know about the 2nd hand market prices now, but I would go for some 14" Thinkpad.
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RePC sells refurbished PCs and I’m happy with what I’ve gotten from them. Don’t know if they’d ship outside the US.
I agree with a 13" or 14" ThinkPad. I use a ThinkPad X390 (13.3") that I bought new six years ago. It’s very portable with very good battery life. It dual-boots Leap 16 and Windows 11. Used ones seem to sell for US$ 200 to 250. Your budget would get something newer and better.
I would say 4GB RAM should also work, at least that is what I have in some 2-in-1 laptop/tablet. It has touchscreen, works fine with Tumbleweed and very portable, keyboard detachable (magnetic). Ideal for checking and admin of various electronic with serial ports only. CPU is not fast (z8350) but only 2 Watt idle. Did cost less than 100 Euros, including USB-C PSU. It originally does come with Windows10, it still works (multi-boot), but usually Tumbleed or Debian stable.
In which part of the world do you want to shop?
You wrote “£”… so I guess UK? Is EU (like Germany) also of interest?
If one actually wants to work on it, 4GB is not enough. It would be swapping giganticly from just a number of browser tabs, let alone running a VM
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OK, I think my perception of ‘admin’ is something else than yours.
I have 2 VM’s running with less than 1G RAM (768M and 384M), but no GUI, only CLI.
How many tabs also depends on what websites. At least I do not experience slow-down due to swapping. But if you want 16G RAM, then so be it.
I paid 150 Euros for an ARM SBC with 16G RAM about a year ago, it is sure double or even triple now due to high RAM prices. And that is only an SBC, just a PCB in fact, far from all the HW you get as a laptop.
The TO asked for a laptop for „office work and admin on the go“. The office work clearly needs a GUI. And no, you cant‘t really work with 4 GB or less…
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CLI < TUI < GUI …
It’s worth looking in shops like Cash Generator. I spotted a very decent 2017 Dell in one which only had a small SSD but I was able to upgrade it with a larger SSD - all for under £200.
I also still have a Dell which originally came with Vista; because it has a level 1 chip Leap 15.6 is the last version of Leap which it can run but 19 years and no hardware problems isn’t bad going.
Thanks for all the replies, I went for a Thinkpad T14s which looks like it ticks all the boxes.
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You could still put TW or Aeon or Kalpa on it. I have Kalpa on an i3, 4GB, 128GB from 2012 and it works well for such a poor machine.
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