Wanted: Refurbished laptop with SSD, Windows 10, USBs 2 & 3, upto £350

chaucer

@AlwaysThere

Laptop ... somewhat knackered, screen housing split, overheats ...
Samsung R519 15.6in Laptop V2.
Intel Pentium Dual Core Processor T4200. 2GHz 1MB cache. 3GB DDR2 RAM. 250GB hard drive. Intel GMA 4500M Vista Home Premium


Tower ... over ten years old Dell Vostro 400 ... still works but slow and with a noisy fan.

chaucer

@prenton ... ship from China?

prenton01

Yes mate all good

I have an Xiaomi mi max phone from same place and many other things i will be purchasing one of these myself as soon as i can

chaucer

Analogy ...

Back in the day, if choosing a car, there was basically Ford, Vauxhall, some others, a few import makes, some niche or minority or specialised makes.
You could have a small, medium or large size (think Fiesta, Escort, Cortina, Granada) with s, m, l engines.
That was about as complicated as it got.

Now, imagine someone transported through time to now ... with dozens of makes, untold sizes and styles ... city-urban-suv-mpv-4x4-CC-hatch-people-carrier-saloon-etc-etc-etc.

I feel like that person.
Totally overwhelmed by the variety of makes, models, specs.
I simply can't get a handle on it.

If I said I wanted a reasonable size reliable car for normal every day use that isn't too expensive to buy or maintain someone might direct me to a Toyota Auris or Ford Focus or a Hyundai i30 etc.
If I also said I'm happy to buy a used but good condition model to increase my bang-for-the-buck ...

That's where I'm at in my laptop hunt ...

A narrowed down list of possible makes, models and even retailers would help me so much.

As AlwaysThere said, I may need a bit of patience ... but at least I would have a better chance of seeing it when it did come along.

chaucer

Someone recommended this ...
It's over budget and I don't know it at all ...

https://www.encore-pc.co.uk/stone-notebook-i5-6200u-2-30ghz-128gb-hard-drive-8gb-memory

prenton01

Why not ?
Bad experience or never done it before??

bengalknights

http://www.tier1online.com/728-n3c29uk-b/lenovo-thinkpad-twist-s230u-i7-3517u-8gb-ips-touchscreen-12-5-grade-b

This seems to have it all except the screen res

jamesd

£350 isn't necessarily too restrictive a budget, but do you really want to insist on used machines instead of new? Hard to say what specs you actually need because you haven't said what it's for.

An i7 CPU doesn't reduce noise, it'll need the most cooling of any CPU you'd buy, even in the mobile versions it'll be the one using the fan most. Though if you had the budget, something like the HP Spectre x360 doesn't usually make noticeable noise - I tried two with i7's before giving up on them due to faults, failed SSD in the first, non-working keys in the second. But at a price of over £1800 those were way above your budget. The U is a particular model of the Intel chips, lower power versions of the chip, but still quite powerful, the HPs have that version of the i7 and when doing light work like web browsing they were drawing under 10W of power for the whole computer and no fan use. Up to the full 90W that their power adapter could supply when doing CPU-intensive work like 7-Zip file compression, with not really noticeable fan use.

Full size USB 2 and USB 3 things both work fine in either USB 2 or USB 3 sockets, just at different speeds. USB C is a different sized connector and with an adapter supports both the older full size USB 2 and USB 3 and the USB C connector. The USB C connector usually also supports higher speeds but it doesn't have to, it can be restricted to just USB 3 speed and I have one of those in a desktop computer. The micro-USB connectors can be either USB 2 or USB 3 but aren't USB C style; you'll probably need a cheap on the go (OTG) adapter to connect full size USB 2 or USB 3 devices to one.

If it's for general use like internet, spreadsheets, word processing and watching videos, the one I'm typing this reply on is a Chuwi Hi13 tablet. £309.99 new including shipping. The keyboard is optional and useful, partly for the two USB ports. As I type I have a full size keyboard and wired mouse connected to the USB port and a 4k 32" monitor connected to the micro-HDMI port. The tablet is off to my left and I'm using the monitor, keyboard and mouse just like a desktop computer, with its built in display turned off. Easy to watch a film or something from YouTube while lying down in bed if that takes your fancy and you're using just the tablet on its own.

The reason I have that one is the high screen resolution 3000x2000 on the built in display. It makes no noise at all because it has a solid state drive built in, though not as fast as a fast SSD. It's not the one to go for if you want very fast CPU work but it does have hardware video decoding built in for the VP9 video used by YouTube and h265 so that's easy to handle. The solid state drive comes with about 16GB of the total 64GB used by Windows. One of the first things I did was shrink that system drive down to 24GB using the Disk management tool, then use the freed space for a user drive for storing my things. That cuts the size of backups of the OS. The RAM is 4GB and that's fine for general use, particularly given the speed of the solid state drive, which means that there's seldom any delay in getting things done, unlike a spinning hard drive.

Optional things that I've added are:

£41: the keyboard, with built in track pad and a couple of full size USB2 ports. Now you have a convertible, not just a tablet.
£66: a 200GB micro-SD card, more disk storage, it's invisible in the socket in the tablet.
£15: better power adapter, Aukey 29W model. This is recommended as compatible and is, not all USB-C power adapters will supply the 12 volts needed by this tablet, it's an optional part of the specification. In their forum it's very strongly recommend as a better option than using the supplied power adapter.
£8: good quality type C cable for the Aukey, it doesn't come with one. The supplied adapter has a cheap and likely to wear out soon connector that can't be replaced. This cable doesn't support the high USB C potential speeds, it's just for power. The right angle connector is nice to further reduce the bending of the cable where it connects to the tablet.
£5: micro-HDMI to HDMI cable to go to my 30" 4k monitor.
£12 USB C extension cable.
£54: USB power bank, this comes with USB C cable so you won't necessarily need another if you want this for some reason, though the ones I have are far more robust. Like the optional adapter this does supply the required 12 volts. Fast charging for phones and other things as well as the computer.
£3: On the go adapter so you can plug full size USB 2/3 things into the micro-USB2 port on the tablet.

Those are optional things, just what I have. If you want a lot more disk space sometime you can add something like this in sizes up to 8000GB and use a wired connection to a wifi router to get at it, or do that via the internet while travelling. Or for more portability something like this. At the moment I'm mostly using an external 8TB drive connected to a circa six year old Windows 7 laptop's USB2 port for lots of extra storage via Windows networking, with that mapped to a drive letter on the Chuwi that connects to it over the wifi network.

If you have't used displays with high resolution, they increase the clarity of what you see and you can scale things up and down if you want them to be bigger. A lower resolution display of the same size will be less sharp when things on screen are the same size. I can read the Financial Times e-Paper edition (a copy of the printed pages) easily in portrait mode on the 3000x2000 display.

For anyone not familiar with the CPU, as I'm typing this sentence it's running at 20% use at 1.55GHz (max is 2.2GHz). 2.7 of 3.4GB of RAM in use, 702 megabytes available. 27 tabs open in 7 different Chrome browser windows. Close them all down and it's dropping around one in five frames full screen in this YouTube demo video at 3840x2160 at 30Hz with 50% CPU use, not enough for me to notice. Microsoft says the Edge browser is faster for this sort of thing and it does a lot better: just two frames dropped running full screen after about three minutes and 5200 frames. Eleven minutes in and still just two frames dropped, with the video connection speed typically running at about 70 megabits per second over my wifi connection.

Using Handbrake for h265 video encoding using the software-only x265 encoding library this tablet is encoding at about the same frame rate as a Core i5 M 520 CPU released six years earlier that's running at 2.4GHz. Not particularly fast, enough to do a 480p DVD TV program in about four hours per hour using the Handbrake MKV 480p slow preset. A potentially key difference is that the Chuwi tablet has hardware support for both encoding and decoding and the old i5 doesn't. But for this I just wanted to compare the raw CPUs, not the difference made by the hardware encoder. If I use the hardware on the Chuwi it's about ten times as fast as not using it.

Don't go for this sort of thing if you want lots of desktop power and electrical power use, but if you want a very portable high resolution system for normal productivity and day to day tasks it's an interesting choice that I'm happy with.

AlSto

mcscom.co.uk/product/dell-inspiron-15-5558-i5-5200u-2-20ghz-8gb-500gb-920m-15-6-fhd-w10h-1yr-rtb-wty-mln602/ @ £282 fit perfectly into your budget.

viking-direct.co.uk/a/pb/SSD-TOSHIBA-240GB-Q300/id=5408680/ for £67.79

Right on the nose and ticks your every box and more.

grumpycrab

jamesd wrote: »

the one I'm typing this reply on is a Chuwi Hi13 tablet. £309.99 new including shipping.

Seller from GongDongSheng; how much from a UK seller?