Need a Refurbished Laptop

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Four or five years ago (I think) Mrs. Tdbo's desktop computer died.
She wanted "a cheap laptop"
Took her to buy one, she picked out a Toshiba Satellite C55D-S5531. I think I paid about $350. at the time.
Went along with this because of the "Happy wife, happy life" theory.
That is all well and good until it goes bad.
She hates this thing because it is slow. I have done everything I knew how to do to speed it up. Removed unnecessary programs, ran Ccleaner, ran malware removal programs, etc. with limited to no success.
This machine is a total fido.
It took me over a minute to get on line the other night. It takes Mrs. Tdbo has latched onto my new Toshiba with an I5 processor and really likes it. I really want it back.
I doubt that much could be done with the machine in question, although I would be willing to listen to options.
She uses the machine to serve the web, e mails, word processing mostly. While most any machine can do that, the both of us want something as fast as is reasonably possible.
I want to keep this on the cheap, so I am looking at refurbs in the $250. or less range. I am open to any make except for HP. I have been looking on line until I am somewhat confused. If those who are more computer knowledgeable than myself could post links to suitable machines that would meet these criteria, I would be appreciative. Thanks in advance
 
Best deal I ever got on a nice laptop was on Ebay. I bought it for my son, its an I5 I believe, used for graphic workstations, a Dell M4500. Retail on this machine is 1700, I bought it re-furbished for 379. It came in a box like it was new, and its been flawless. Run my sons games and Autocad like a high end machine should.
 
Before you replace it, turn off windows update, uninstall windows essentials security and replace with something else, install a noscript, install an ad blocker This has worked for me to speed up a slow computer UMMV. Especially turning of windows update.
 
I'm typing this on an HP DM1Z, which probably has the exact same APU as yours (AMD E-350.) Sure, it's not as fast as the others and could be considered dog-slow by even the most patient person in the world, but I've used it for everything, from surfing the internet to taking it on business travel and doing productivity work and it keeps going well enough.

I want to replace it, and I told myself that I would swap out when the next Skylake processors came out, but this thing is still kicking along, so now I'll wait for Canonlake to come out and Skylake-powered laptops to become very inexpensive (another year.) The reason I can wait, though, is because we consume most of our media via streaming to our TV, and I've also got a low-level gaming PC (was mid-high level, but is 5 years old) that will handle everything else while I'm home.

For you, if cost is an issue (it is for most of us) I'd recommend an Ivybridge-powered laptop, which is three generations old, since they seem to be incredibly heavily discounted for whatever reason right now and will blow our E-series APU's out of the water, if you can find them, that is!

Ivybridge is the third generation of i-series processors and is denoted by a 3 in the beginning of the designation (3XXXX)

If you want something a little more powerful, but still reasonably priced, check out dealnews.com for a good Broadwell (denoted by a 5XXXX) i3 processor-powered laptop with other low-level specs (e.g., n wifi instead of ac, etc.)
 
couple of things you could do
1. download (free) ccleaner from cnet and run a disk cleanup, then
registry cleanup. may or may not speed things up.
2. if your handy, download manual, and open the covers on the bottom
and vacuum clean the cpu/fan assembly. could help cool things down.
3. SSD drives are cheap these days - Kingston 120GB is about $40.
if you clone your hard disk to this SSD, everything will be faster
(booting, web page loading - all will benefit from windows writing to
a much faster drive [caching])

Bob
 
Originally Posted By: Rand
what size screen?

There are plenty of t420 i5 laptops for 209$ or so

http://us.refurb.io/collections/lenovo/products/lenovo-thinkpad-t420-laptop-8gb-320gb-i5-2-5ghz

229$
LENOVO THINKPAD T420, 14.1” LAPTOP, INTEL CORE i5 2520M 2.5GHz, 8GB DDR3 RAM, 320GB SATA HDD, DVD, WINDOWS 7 PROFESSIONAL

you say no HP but what about HP Elitebook?


Screen size in this machine is not critical. I think the one in the Toshiba we are discussing has a 14".
Not familiar with the current HP line to know what the Elitebook is but I had an experience with an HP lemon years ago which pretty much swore me off them for good.
 
If it has stupid slow 5400 hard drive, you can make it much, much faster by simply shifting over to an SSD drive. Things will open up much faster and the machine will start and shut off much faster. Taking a few screws off the bottom of the laptop, sliding the old hard drive out and putting it back together is easier than you think.
 
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Best Buy had decent looking Leveno's for $350 in this weekend's ad.

AMD A10 I believe, not sure what gen.

Refurb may have some internals pass inspection, but the battery, power supply and ports can be hit or miss for longevity.

How about reflashing HD, or installing a cheap SSD and memory and reload OS like another member mentioned?

CCleaner, AVG, Spybot and Malwarebytes (all free versions) have kept my laptops running fine for years.

Good luck let us know what you decide.
 
I've been getting mine directly from Dell Financial on eBay. No issues whatsoever. These are refurbished off-lease units, and Dell stands behind them.

I had one arrive with a weak battery. They credited $50 (plus tax) back to my credit card, and then I bought a brand new OEM Dell battery on eBay for less than that.

eBay: dell-official-store-usa-refurbished
 
My son bought a chromebook for $90 after sales and his Target discount. I think it was $140 full price. Anyhow, its pretty impressive. Turn it on, and you're logged in and online in a few seconds. It lacks a lot like a hard drive, CD drive and such, but taking advantage of Google Drive and Docs he is able to use it for school and of course its a great web browser. Plus it weighs about 2 pounds.
 
If all was originally fine, and now it's not, then that leads to it might be junked up. Depends on what sites she visits, what's running in the background, etc.

I cleaned out a friends confuser last year that was just unusable. One thing, her AV SW was configured to run a FULL SCAN everytime the machine was turned on. The cpu would go to 100%, making it unusable for about 6 min. Further, it was indeed infected. Ads popping up regularly...just a mess.

You didn't mention any machine specs, nor what OS is being used. Sounds to me like it's time to reinstall the OS, and start using something like Ublock Origin and possibly a script blocker.

Right click on the task bar, start up Task Manager, and tell us how many processes are running, what the cpu usage is and what percentage of memory is being used. You'll find this info at the bottom of the window.
 
At that price point, a refurb business class laptop is your best bet. HP Elitebook and Dell Latitude are two that I'm certain of.

IIRC, Lenovo has diluted the Thinkpad brand by introducing cheaper consumer-grade products under that name. You'll need to look for specific models under the Thinkpad name in order to be sure. The T-series (T410, T420, T430) mentioned above is one good bet.

My current laptop is an old 12.1" Elitebook 2540 with a 1st gen i-5. It's a little long in the tooth, but I don't need it to do any heavy lifting. It does great with everyday home use.
 
Plan A: Fresh install operating system, buy ssd, clone and install

Plan B: if wife not happy use ssd in refurbished laptop

Then if something happens you have fresh image to clone from extra hard drive.
 
Originally Posted By: sleddriver
I cleaned out a friends confuser last year that was just unusable. One thing, her AV SW was configured to run a FULL SCAN everytime the machine was turned on. The cpu would go to 100%, making it unusable for about 6 min. Further, it was indeed infected. Ads popping up regularly...just a mess.



I believe the subject laptop has similar specs to my little netbook, with an AMD E-350 APU. I can't run any scans and hope to be productive. I only run scans manually, after I'm done for the day; once per week or so I'll initiate a scan and leave the laptop on overnight to complete.

Without any bloat in the background, this thing does just fine for everyday use, though watching videos and other relatively easy tasks do tax it quickly.
 
for everyone giving advice you would be wise to see the specs of the "netbook" the OP has before suggesting software remedies

The e-350
it has a passmark score of 750
https://cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+E-350&id=249

That means no software will make it acceptably faster

My 5 year old sandybridge celeron based 240$ notebook is 2x faster.

the t420 refurb i suggested for 209$ would be over 4x faster
at 3500 cpumark.
 
Originally Posted By: sleddriver
If all was originally fine, and now it's not, then that leads to it might be junked up. Depends on what sites she visits, what's running in the background, etc.

I cleaned out a friends confuser last year that was just unusable. One thing, her AV SW was configured to run a FULL SCAN everytime the machine was turned on. The cpu would go to 100%, making it unusable for about 6 min. Further, it was indeed infected. Ads popping up regularly...just a mess.

You didn't mention any machine specs, nor what OS is being used. Sounds to me like it's time to reinstall the OS, and start using something like Ublock Origin and possibly a script blocker.

Right click on the task bar, start up Task Manager, and tell us how many processes are running, what the cpu usage is and what percentage of memory is being used. You'll find this info at the bottom of the window.


This thing when new was merely adequate.
Processor is an AMD E-300 APU, which I'm sure greatly contributes to its fido like status.
OS is Win7 Home.
Just turned it on. It registers 88-90 processes, cpu usage is fluctuating between 16-100%, and memory is fluctuating from 39-53%.
Just shut auto update off and am running disc defrag right now, figuring that can't hurt anything.
Running ESET NOD 32 for antivirus.
 
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