Hey all, I need a new laptop and don’t want to spend much money. It just needs to run Linux/Debian, have a functioning battery and be able to play internet videos, nothing more. I have an old Lenovo Thinkpad X220 right now and I’ve heard that Thinkpads are still okay, but does anyone have more concrete suggestions? Thanks in advance!
T480 is the standard thinkpad recommendation. It will jump you 5-6 generations of processor forward in time from your x220 and if you avoid the “s” model then both ram slots will be replaceable.
I just looked and the going eBay rate is ~180 for an everything installed/8gb ram example and ~<$100 for no ssd/os. That’s important if you have an ssd in your 220 that’s compatible and can backup and steamroll over it in your new pc. A good set of 2x 16gb 2400 sodimms is about $30.
So you could be up and running on your old ssd with the maximum amount of memory your new system supports for $130 out the door. Pretty cool.
The t480 can also accommodate the google (nee coral) tpu for accelerated onboard machine vision processing and other torch stuff.
Thinkpads after that one generally have one or both ram slots soldered, which isn’t as much of a big deal as people make it out to be.
Other recommendations in the same vein are hp and dell business class laptops, but I don’t know them well enough to point you one direction or another.
Because you’re running Linux already: if you can swing it, consider getting an m1 macbook air. They’re cheap and fast and it’s one more tool in your toolbox.
Beware with HP business laptops back in the day they had serious security and you could not reset the BIOS if the password was lost without contacting HP for a special unlock code and going through this whole thing. They shut down providing those (and if you bought it used you almost certainly couldn’t provide the documentation to get them to help anyways) so probably models made in the past few years are okay but if you get anything older make sure right away you can access the bios and it’s not PW protected before the return period is up or that could cause problems.