Originally Posted by
javabytes
I was looking for a travel notebook recently. I ended up settling on a used/refurbished ThinkPad X220 from Arrow Direct. 12.5" screen, 3 pounds, Core i5 2.6GHz, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD, Win 7 Pro, Grade A condition. Cost me about $200. Battery life seems to be 10-12 hours. Has the fantastic ThinkPad keyboard (before they switched to the chiclet style). Blows a netbook or ChromeBook out of the water. Honestly, now that machines have SSDs, it doesn't matter if the CPU is a generation or two old unless you're doing seriously CPU heavy work. And 8GB of DDR3 RAM will cost you $30, or 16GB for $60. The vast majority of people don't have a need for anything more.
With the transition to ULV processors, a full power
i5-2520M or
i5-3320M processor from a couple generations back are only marginally slower than a mainstream
i5-6300U today.
They're all way the heck faster than the
Celeron/Pentium CPUs in the netbook-like machines... like 3-4x faster, which will be noticeable to anyone.
The big disadvantage, for some, to the older machines is battery life -- this is less pronounced with the X220/X230 (which for their generation had great battery life, especially with the extended battery) but then again the X240/X250 have absurdly good life now. Also, with 3rd-party refurbished machines you never know what kind of condition the battery will be in -- sometimes great, sometimes worn out.
Still, for $200 plus a little ram, a cheap SSD, and a replacement battery, bringing it up to just under $500, an used X220 beats a lot of newer systems in that price range.