Originally Posted by
DenverBrian
Find something you like at Costco and be done with it.
Or one of these on Amazon - including refurbs that are great deals:
https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-IdeaPa...dp/B09RNC69K8/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09JGP5YHM
..
I'm assuming you want a "common" laptop - 14 inch or 15 inch screen, running Windows 10 or 11. I recommend an Intel Core i5 processor or better; 8 GB RAM or more; 256GB hard drive or larger; ALWAYS a solid state drive (SSD), NEVER a spinning disk drive these days; screen resolution 1920x1080 or better.
Refurb "business" laptops are where it's at. Lots of big businesses, government departments, etc. either lease laptops for 2-3 years or buy them but surplus them as soon as the warranty is up. There's a massive supply of 2-5 year old business laptops out there and now that the 'rona is mostly in the rearview mirror, supply is outstripping demand again.
Unless you need a really small or really large laptop, the big surplus/refurb sellers on eBay or Amazon are easily the best deal out there. For the price of a Chromebook, you get a perfectly good laptop with real specs that most casual users won't outgrow for 5+ years (as long as you either buy one with an SSD or upgrade it the second you get it home).
Originally Posted by
GadgetFreak
[Netbooks] haven’t been produced for like a decade. I had one for traveling also.
The name is dead, but the concept of a cheap, low-end machine intended for web browsing is quite alive--most of that market is filled by Chromebooks now, but if you hate yourself you can still buy machines with Chromebook-level hardware that run Windows from all the big manufacturers. Those are basically the same thing as netbooks were.