Cheapest way into a long-term windows system?

[JHZR2]

There hasn't been such a thing as an IBM Thinkpad since 2005, lol.

Lenovo Thinkpads are generally pretty good. So are Dell Latitude business class laptops. For JHZR2's use case, a used off lease Lenovo or Dell on eBay or Amazon would be cheap and perfectly suitable for a long time to come. Something with 4 cores, 16 gigs of RAM and a solid state drive and comes pre loaded with Windows 11 will be usable for years to come.

I’m very well aware of the branding. But the designs were inherited back when. Loved mine. Still have it somewhere.

Yeah I don’t need much.

 

[ka9mnx]

Do you have something that runs Win 10? If not, I would be looking for something that does. Your scanner software probably doesn't need Win 11. Just keep it off the web and only use the web for scanner updates.

 

[BrendanC]

i purchase all of my laptops from dellrefurbished.com

try to find atleast a 10-11th gen i7/i9 and wait for coupons to come by.

 

[meep]

Dell refurbished and dell outlet compete against each other. Latitude is business class and therefore have slightly better components, bearings, serviceability than the lower end stuff and even the xps, which is still consumer grade (and care) line.

The sweet spot is to buy the off-lease latitudes (or sometimes refurb latitudes) that lack Ram or storage, and then possibly upgrade the m.2 SSDD and/or memory. I’ve found that that A-TEC memory on Amazon is dirt cheap and seems to work fine with the latitudes (have it in 3 now at work). Latitudes are not the cheapest deals out there, but they last. I prefer not to touch an HP. I’ve not dealt much with Lenovo but IBM has a company is really hard to deal with.