Originally Posted by
javabytes
Agreed. The machine already had an SSD for the $200 price, and the battery seems to be in great working order, but with the refurbs you never really know. I bumped up the RAM to 8GB, so $230 all in.
Can't beat that; pretty dang hard to beat that even if you have to replace the battery sooner than you'd like.
Originally Posted by
IsleOfMan
I'd give the Dell E6220 and E6230 a look on Arrow Direct as well... like the X220, it's not the thinnest/lightest in the category but it's rock solid and excellent value in the ~$200 range (not seeing any with SSD in that price range, but still).
The E6220 and E6230 are really nice machines; a bit chunkier than the X220/X230 and not as nice a keyboard as the X220, but they have the distinct advantage for people who want to keep them a long time of being very, very easy machines to repair/replace parts in -- much, much easier disassembly than the Lenovo X series.
The other down side is no 9-cell battery -- options for the internal battery is 6-cell -- although if you don't mind the extra weight the 9-cell "slice" is still available and while it makes for a comically thick and heavy machine, at the time they were new the E6230 I had with 15 cells total was the closest to a truly all-day machine I'd ever seen.
Dell also has the annoying habit of sourcing screens from different sources for the same machine; the difference in contrast level and brightness between the better SKUs and worse is pretty dramatic.
Originally Posted by
IsleOfMan
This won't really apply to the OP since they're looking for netbook level performance, but keep in mind that the Core i3/5/7 M & U series really made a notable performance jump from 2nd to 3rd gen, similar to the jump made from 1st to 2nd gen in the Desktop i5/i7 Quad Core chips.
I wouldn't personally touch anything with a U-series chip older than the 4th generation, although the 3rd-generation ones are almost tolerable. Starting with the 4th generation, of course, the "U" series are the mainstream.
The jump in performance from the i5-5xxM to the i5-25xxM to the i5-33xxM was pretty dramatic with each generation, as you said, but I think most people will still be pretty pleased with the 25xxM chips: they are nearly as fast as the 6th-generation 6xxxU chips being sold as mainstream today.
The biggest
theoretical disadvantage to the 2nd-generation chips is that they don't have a very good integrated GPU compared to the 3rd-generation and newer, but Windows 10 is less demanding of GPUs than Vista and 7 were, and unless you're doing
heavy photo editing or video editing, the difference between 2nd/3rd/4th generation Intel HD graphics is unlikely to matter, and none of the three are good enough for even fairly casual gaming or professional 3D graphics anymore.