A laptop bought for a fiver in a charity shop. How do I turn the thing on?

[HMS_Dave]

Well a woman I got chatting to in Currys the other month, who sells their laptops told me not to bother with the 600 quid ones as the ones for about £250 to £300 are just as decent. 🤔

She probably looked at your use case and decided that just surfing the web a simple laptop will get you by. The specs on your laptop are low end a few years ago now, so a new low end one still probably offers a reasonable upgrade...

In fairness, She sounds like a decent person, honestly. It sounds very much like currys are not trying to oversell things to make more money off people who are never going to use a computer to its full doing photo editing and encoding videos or what have you which is surprisingly reassuring...

 

[Accy cyclist]

She probably looked at your use case and decided that just surfing the web a simple laptop will get you by. The specs on your laptop are low end a few years ago now, so a new low end one still probably offers a reasonable upgrade...

In fairness, She sounds like a decent person, honestly. It sounds very much like currys are not trying to oversell things to make more money off people who are never going to use a computer to its full doing photo editing and encoding videos or what have you which is surprisingly reassuring...

Unless she was on commission to get rid of the cheaper ones?! 🤔 No, she was very nice and even told me most of her life history! In fact I couldn't get away and left almost forgetting what I went in for in the first place!!🤔

 

[Accy cyclist]

I suppose I could buy a reconditioned expensive one from a bloke in town who sells such laptops for the same price as a Currys cheaper one, but you only get a "If it conks out, bring it back and I'll fix it" 'guarantee', whereas if you buy one from such as Currys they'll replace it without question, providing you haven't dropped it in the bath or summat daft like that!!

 

[HMS_Dave]

I suppose I could buy a reconditioned expensive one from a bloke in town who sells such laptops for the same price as a Currys cheaper one, but you only get a "If it conks out, bring it back and I'll fix it" 'guarantee', whereas if you buy one from such as Currys they'll replace it without question, providing you haven't dropped it in the bath or summat daft like that!!

A second hand one wouldn't be a bad option if you know what you are looking for, but then i would question "do i really need another right now?"

 

[Accy cyclist]

A second hand one wouldn't be a bad option if you know what you are looking for, but then i would question "do i really need another right now?"

I bought a reconditioned expensive one before I bought my current cheaper one. The reconditioned one's screen went blank. The seller supposedly fixed it, but it went blank again soon after. I just chucked it in the bin and went to Currys to buy one.

 

[DRM]

https://www.stonerefurb.co.uk/brands/lenovo
Any of these will knock spots off anything Currys sell, I'm typing this on a 2011 Thinkpad T420, still working brilliantly built like a tank, but then again it cost some business about £1500 new

 

[bikingdad90]

I’ve just had to go through the hassle of buying one after my 5 year old Lenovo v15 and the integrated graphics card broke (AMD Ryzen 3).

I’ve just replaced it with an ASUS Vivobook 15” screen with 16gb RAM and 1TB SSD hard drive with an Intel I5 processor for £419 from Amazon. It is genuinely on sale as everywhere else has it for the RRP.

https://amzn.eu/d/efu4j1C

The minimum spec for windows 11 is 4GB ram so at 16gb I should be able to have a few tabs open and a basic document like Word/excel etc.

 

[Accy cyclist]

https://www.stonerefurb.co.uk/brands/lenovo
Any of these will knock spots off anything Currys sell, I'm typing this on a 2011 Thinkpad T420, still working brilliantly built like a tank, but then again it cost some business about £1500 new

Is it waterproof though as I've been known to spill my half pint glass very close to this and previous laptops when having a beer in my kitchen, like I'm doing now!🍻

 

[DRM]

Is it waterproof though as I've been known to spill my half pint glass very close to this and previous laptops when having a beer in my kitchen, like I'm doing now!🍻

No laptop is waterproof, but i believe some Thinkpads have drain holes in them

 

[irw]

Chucking laptops in the bin has been mentioned a few times on here…please don’t do this- there are places you can take them which will responsibly and securely dispose of them. Chucking them in the bin is very bad for the environment and wasteful, as some of the materials can be recycled.

 

[DRM]

I bought a reconditioned expensive one before I bought my current cheaper one. The reconditioned one's screen went blank. The seller supposedly fixed it, but it went blank again soon after. I just chucked it in the bin and went to Currys to buy one.

https://outlet.euro.dell.com/Online/InventorySearch.aspx?brandId=3&c=uk&cs=ukdfb1&l=en&s=dfb
Also any of these will be far superior to anything from Currys

 

[stephec]

Chucking laptops in the bin has been mentioned a few times on here…please don’t do this- there are places you can take them which will responsibly and securely dispose of them. Chucking them in the bin is very bad for the environment and wasteful, as some of the materials can be recycled.

Not to mention the security aspect as well.

Can you imagine the shock someone would have if they hacked it and found all that tweed porn?

 

[Accy cyclist]

Not to mention the security aspect as well.

Can you imagine the shock someone would have if they hacked it and found all that tweed porn?

Well I did wait till the binmen arrived before putting it in the bin. I wasn't risking just putting it in the bin days before it was due to be emptied as there are skip rats/bin rooters around here who'd love to find a laptop, on the off chance it still works. Even though it didn't work the skip rat might've been a technical wizard who could've fixed it to then find things on it I'd rather not talk about!!

 

[Accy cyclist]

On about laptops heading to landfill sites, what became of that bloke's computer, who said his girlfriend accidentally binned it with info' on worth hundreds of millions of Bitcoin stuff? He went to court asking to be allowed to dig for it in the tons of rubbish it's buried under. Did he get the court's permission to use JCB's to search for it I wonder. Even if he did find it, would it still hold that vital info' potentially worth many many millions, or would rain, damp etc damage make it impossible to retrieve?🤔

 

[bikingdad90]

On about laptops heading to landfill sites, what became of that bloke's computer, who said his girlfriend accidentally binned it with info' on worth hundreds of millions of Bitcoin stuff? He went to court asking to be allowed to dig for it in the tons of rubbish it's buried under. Did he get the court's permission to use JCB's to search for it I wonder. Even if he did find it, would it still hold that vital info' potentially worth many many millions, or would rain, damp etc damage make it impossible to retrieve?🤔

A common trick of IT peeps is to disconnect the hard drive and stick it in the freezer for 30mins to chill. The cooler operating temperatures do something magic when recovering data.