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Comment by julianeon | Hacker News Reader

eBay. Just wait for good listings. It's true that there is a non-negligible chance of getting burned, based on the general used laptop purchasing experience - but I've bought several and they've all worked as expected, pretty much.

This isn't due to any good qualities of the sellers. It's because ThinkPad makes damn good, sturdy laptops that are quite idiot-proof. I mean if you sit on your balcony and drop your laptop off the edge - that might destroy it. But it's going to take something on that level, and most people aren't that careless with electronics.

So you can be reasonably confident that anything ThinkPad you buy, if it isn't visibly damaged in the picture, will work as expected, in my (anecdotal) experience.

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Thank you for responding. Is there any particular model that is better off than others, used? My usecase is programming - I don’t game, but I edit videos

I think the main thing you're looking for is 1) RAM - as much as you can get for your buck (might be worth lurking for a week to find out how much that is) 2) SSD.

If you get a high number on 1 and a checkmark on 2, it's almost guaranteed to be good for programming - realistically, for allowing you to run your browsers and something like GIMP and/or video editing.

I have a ThinkPad with 32 GB RAM and it takes a really heavy workload to pause my computer.

I frequently have several browsers & several browser windows open (say 6 windows total, mix of Chrome Brave and Firefox), and GIMP. No slowdowns noticeable (EDIT: some things do take a few seconds, like filters & exporting images from GIMP). Most importantly, using my window manager, I can switch from a full-screen browser to Emacs to GIMP instantaneously - not even a millisecond of noticeable delay.

Even many new computers purchased today can't beat that.

Stick to the T-Series, avoid the budget E-Series.

Also check for the screen. For quite a long time there was an Option for an abysmal 1366x768 screen. The same notebooks can be had with a proper HD screen, so get one with those.

You want to check whether the BIOS has a password on it. Most corporates use one but don't reset it at end of life and after the T420 you can't reset it without replacing the main board.

That's a really important point. To amplify on it, every ThinkPad has as many as three BIOS passwords: the hard drive password, the power on password, and the supervisor password. (Maybe even more than three, as individual hard drives/SSDs could have different passwords.)

The supervisor password is the one you care the most about.

You may get a seller who says "no BIOS password, boots up without a password." But the machine may still have a supervisor password, and if you don't have that you can't change the BIOS settings.

Always make sure there is no supervisor password, or the seller gives you the supervisor password.

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