A good & durable laptop

[fnita2266]

Hello everyone !

 

I am looking for a laptop to replace my old Core2Duo that I upgraded over the years with some SSD and RAM.

 

1. Country: Canada (OK for stores shipping from US)
2. Condition: new or used, whatever will offer a good quality for reasonable price
3. Budget: 700 CA$ exl tax
4. Usage:

• I primarily use my laptop for web and software development and running some VM.
• Gaming is very rare as I have a PS4 that is enough for me, but I might play some older titles on it from time to time.
• It will be connected to a USB-C dock when I'm at home, so this will be my primary machine

 

My old laptop was a Thinkpad T400 which is extremely up gradable and is well built, I would like to hear your suggestions to have some good replacement for it.

 

Thanks !

[Qyygle]

Does size matter too much? Also, regarding the USB-C dock, does it need to charge over the USB-C port, or can charging be through a dedicated charging port still?

 

There're a lot of old Thinkpad Workstations that're higher spec and newer than your old Core2Duo, and will be fine for what you've described. You can find P50, P51, etc. on Ebay Cadana going for under the budget you quoted, like this:

Lenovo ThinkPad P50,Core i7-6820HQ,2.7 GHz,16 GB,512 SSD,Win 10 Pro,Touch Screen | eBay

LENOVO THINKPAD P51s 16GB RAM 256 SSD M.2 INTEL i7 7600U 7TH GEN 1920 X 1080P | eBay

 

These will be most upgradable and best bang-buck in my opinion. If you want new, you might need to shop around a bit, I'm not in Canada so I have no reference on pricing/availability of options there.

 

 

[fnita2266]

On 12/20/2022 at 7:08 PM, Qyygle said:

Does size matter too much? Also, regarding the USB-C dock, does it need to charge over the USB-C port, or can charging be through a dedicated charging port still?

 

There're a lot of old Thinkpad Workstations that're higher spec and newer than your old Core2Duo, and will be fine for what you've described. You can find P50, P51, etc. on Ebay Cadana going for under the budget you quoted, like this:

Lenovo ThinkPad P50,Core i7-6820HQ,2.7 GHz,16 GB,512 SSD,Win 10 Pro,Touch Screen | eBay

LENOVO THINKPAD P51s 16GB RAM 256 SSD M.2 INTEL i7 7600U 7TH GEN 1920 X 1080P | eBay

 

These will be most upgradable and best bang-buck in my opinion. If you want new, you might need to shop around a bit, I'm not in Canada so I have no reference on pricing/availability of options there.

 

 

Tjhank you for your reply, I don't think a dedicated GPU would make a difference for my usage as far as I play older titles or retro emulators. For usb-c dock, charging on the same port would be a great addition.

 

I fount the following laptops but I'm not sure if they would work for me:

https://www.ebay.ca/itm/195290746846
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/285078183528

 

Thanks !

[Qyygle]

The 2 you list should work fine too. Note they have a single accessible ram slot for these machines with part of the RAM permanently soldered to the motherboard so the upgrade path for RAM will be smaller than a full dual slot machine, but in the 14" and smaller segment, upgradable RAM is rare to begin with.

 

Note the T14 doesn't come with an OS, so if you need windows plan to budget for the windows 10 license (if that matters to you). The E14 only has a 256 gb SSD, so I'd plan to upgrade that too if I went that route, but durability wise they should both be pretty good. Both should also be able to dock/charge over usb-C