There has been nothing that is compelling enough to spend on an upgrade to hold me over for the next 3-4 years, but my laptop IS showing some battle wear and has had some difficulty turning off and on these days. Five years of service in factories around the globe is a full tour. I decided to pick up something inexpensive and use that for a year until something comes along compelling enough to get me to open my wallet further.

$500 picked up an open box Thinkpad E560. It's not super svelte and it isn't a scorcher on performance, but it will do the job. Maybe a little less sturdy than the T series I'd been loyal to but I'm not planning to keep this five years like my T520. I think I'll like having the numeric keypad - I have to key in ASCII key values now and then and it is a real pain on laptops without that.

The $500 open box unit has a i7-6500U, AMD Radeon R7 M370 2gb video, Win 10 Pro, 15.6" FHD IPS display, and 8gb RAM + conventional 500gb hard drive. Another $26 brings the RAM to 16gb and another $125 brings a 512gb SSD. For $650 after mods I'm feeling pretty good on that. Let's see what they can do for a quad-core+HT low voltage chip in the year to come!