can get a fair bit of laptop for money these days if you are willing to go second hand. My 2007 macbook pro. 2.4ghz C2D, 4gb RAM, nvidia 8600GT M. £100.
I've been looking at those occasionally... I've seen the T430 as well, but I don't like the keyboard design.
The T430 is crap. They changed the design to make it thinner and lighter, but the new design didn't have the reliability and durability Thinkpads are known for. If you want a good Thinkpad, get a T420 or T410. Older models are good, but there's a huge performance gap between Core 2 and i5 CPUs.
I'm currently looking at a Dell Optiplex 510. Pentium D, and an ATi Radeon X850 Pro. I don't really know much else about it other than its BTX and has a bad PSU. Guy wants $50 for it, he's on drugs I'm guessing.
The T430's are okayish but like BlueScreen said, get a T420, it was the last of the great ThinkPads. Mine passed my staircase test where I drop it down a flight of stairs, I've done this to every ThinkPad I've ever owned *T43, T60, T61, T400, T410.* If it doesn't pass its not worth owning. Generally I'm very hard on my laptops mostly due to being clumsy af. The T420 will be great laptop and will never let you down, you can also put the 8 thread i7 2760qm in them if you require CPU horsepower. Also, bought a T420 have we mister BlueScreen. Hope you're not copying me!
As long as it supports Windows 10 and up... Wait, did you just say you throw your notebooks down the stairs to check if they survive? Holy crap. By the way, he won't copy you. His specs are exactly one step better than yours, so the only thing that I could imagine him doing would be buying an old crappy desktop for some reason we don't know.
Not bad. My dad has two old crappy laptops, a ten year old Medion that can't run it and a five year old Acer that can. He still uses the old one because he still hasn't got the Office license for it (he got both from his big brother). Both are very steady, especially the old 14" Medion, and I have to say, I learned to appreciate old laptops very well. They do what they are supposed to and are basically bullet proof.
Also I wouldn't say old laptops are bullet proof a lot of them seem to be extremely fragile. Also another little detail about ThinkPads you can date what year and month they where manufactured by looking at the Type sticker, next to the serial number you will see some digits arranged like so "XX/XX" in my case being "11/06" indicating my ThinkPad was made on June of 2011. Just a little bit of useless info I wanted to share. --- Post updated --- Oh and unofficially you can upgrade the T420 to 16GB's of ram.
Don't know who needs 16GB RAM on an old T420. You may be right though. Let's say the laptops that survived the last 5-10 years may survive the next five too. Science, b*****s. Oh yeah.
Old? 4 years? ummm.. K, and ABS plastic *the type of plastic laptops are made from* gets extremely brittle with age, just ask any vintage mac collector.
I think we need a new plastic to build laptops with... 4 Years can be pretty old for some people by the way. (Yup, I'm insulting Apple users.)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00NXL1S9K?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00 ordered this a few weeks ago. Still waiting
After letting my PC reinstall Windows 8.1 from the recovery disc over night I realised that I couldve just changed my HDD settings in the boot order thing to avoid it from booting in to the broken grub and avoid loosing all my files... Well, I wanted to do a clean reinstall at some point anyways.
Windows won't boot on its own if grub is installed on the MBR. You have to boot from a recovery disk to fix the MBR. GPT based drives should have no problems. But if your drive is set to GPT you shouldn't be using grub anyway.
You want to have a cheaper SATA SSD but don't want to be bottlenecked by the cable? Good idea in theory. In reality you should get your money back and buy yourself an M.2 SSD. 500GB cost about 130 pounds apparently. Don't know which standard you need though.
