It’s rather bizarre. Although I work in IT I do not consider myself a geek, I’m not overly obsessive about having hi-tech kit, the latest, greatest gadgedt or home automation stuff. I don’t even talk to Alexa anymore.
Yes, I have a small rack and a Cisco switch. Yes I ran Cat6 all across my house during refurbishment and run a few NAS servers – but that’s stuff anyone should be doing in any modern home AFAIAC.
Yet somehow, over the years I seem to have accumulated a rather large number of laptops in my home. 12 to be exact.
You might not think that a big number, but for me it was. What on earth are they all doing? Let’s see:
2x work laptops – so they don’t really count. 1 for me, 1 for my better half
1x old IBM Thinkpad X61 running Windows 7 as only that OS works with my Fuji scanner. Why? Because the scanner is my door to a paperless world, and it can scan many, many pages at once UNLIKE my modern Brother MFD scanner which is 1 page at a time!
a newer Lenovo Thinkpad X260 – running esx/vsphere client software to connect to my old ESX boxes on HP Microservers, also a few local VMs via VMware workstation. Replaced the internal HDD with a 1TB SSD, already came with 16GB RAM. Lovely keyboard.
a Fujitsu Lifebook U904 running Fedora 2X and a Kubernetes cluster, needs updating tbh.
Surface Book – Windows 11, used by dd1 for college, uni, work stuff
Lenovo Yoga 3-summat – Windows 10, used by dd2 for school
Surface Laptop – Windows 10, used by dd3 for school. The original Surface, with 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD and a touchscreen. Extremely impressed by this, it just flies and doesn’t show its age. Boots/Shuts down in seconds. Shame the chipset is incompatible with Windows 11
Surface Laptop – mine and exact same spec as above just a different colour, it’s my Windows 10 laptop for regular use. It’s my ‘learning’ resource laptop and I use it for many daily activities
Acer Swiftbook – original ‘family’ laptop with an i1 CPU still running to this day. Used by by Mrs only nowadays. Probably needs updating to Windows 11 if the CPU/chipset support is there
An 8 year old Macbook pro, cannot remember what macOS version it’s running but certainly not an up to date one. Was used as a dev workstation and also a testing rig for work network/access stuff.
a newish Dell Inspiron laptop which I have no idea about – cannot find it’s charger, cannot remember what it runs, what is on it. Found it in a older laptop bag.
Out of all of the above, only 3 were ever purchased brand new, the Surface Book, Lenova Yoga and Acer Swiftbook.
SCC Trade
The majority of the rest were procured from https://www.scctrade.co.uk, Now you have to be careful here, firstly they NEVER supply chargers with laptops. So factor in the cost of buying a charger separately from ebay etc. into the overall cost.
Secondly look for the bargains with higher end CPUs, more RAM (ideally 16GB), and more than 256GB SSDs. Very often they sell the same brand laptop with different specs for the SAME PRICE, or at worst a very close price.
Thirdly, the best and bargain price kit get’s sold extremely quickly. I monitor the site and have noticed how rapidly snipers move in on bargains. So be quick! New device postings are entirely random so you never know.
Go for for SSDs
I avoid laptops with HDDs. Those that I did purchase with HDDs, one of the first immediate ‘upgrades’ I do is to replace it with an SSD. This often gives an older laptop a new lease of life!