Originally Posted by der_saeufer

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).



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.