I got 150€ as a birthday gift and thought that combined with the small amount of money I have, I might just have enough to get an old used laptop. The thing is, I’m not tech savvy and don’t know what kind would be a good choice.
I’d want something old enough to have a DVD slot. Other requirements are having space and battery life, though I don’t think I can have very high standards on my budget. I’d want something that lasts a long time, not some planned obsolence bs.
Are Thinkpads any good? I have been using one for school and think that a Thinkpad might be okay if it just didn’t run Windows. I have been thinking about getting an older Thinkpad and downloading Linux on it, but from what I have heard, Linux seems to be complicated for someone who is not that good with tech. Any thoughts?
Might be hard at that price point but try to avoid anything with a hard drive. You definitely want an SSD.
If you feel adventurous it’s really not difficult to swap a hard drive for SSD, if you are ok doing that it will open up a lot more options.
Sorry, what’s an SSD and why is it better than a hard drive?
SSD stands for Solid State Drive. Hard drives have spinning disks, they wear out much faster, especially in portable devices like a laptop. They are also MUCH slower than SSD’s. System responsiveness is going to be way better with an SSD. Just changing HDD to SSD, a super slow, nearly unusable system, can become completely usable for day to day activities.
Used Thinkpads get a lot of positive press. You’re right to look into that.
I can’t help you directly, but I can offer some encouagemnet on the Linux front. I just installed Pop!Os on a 15 year old laptop. The only technical things I had to do were download the software that let me put the installer on a flash drive, and dig up one console command to enable the very old touchscreen. Everything else in the experience has been as easy as Windows. In some cases, easier - for example, software updates don’t force the computer to restart
Sounds good, I’ll keep that in mind.
