Mini Thrift and Fix Guide 2024: Buy High Value Laptop for extremely cheap - Thinkpad AMD
It costs about $150. This is a great find. Got it from someone who doesn't understand computer hardware for cheap. This laptop would have cost about $600-700 3-4 years ago, and is in mint condition, judging by minimal amount of the dust on the fan and 961 power on counts and 301 hours of recorded data from the SSD.
Things fixed:
1, Removed a few hard core stickers from the previous owner. This is a tough job made extremely easy with some 99% alcohol.
2, Cleaned up the internal and re-pasted the slightly dried up CPU
3, Updated the system and installed all the drivers
Benchmark PCmark 8.0
CPU mark: 13,349
3D mark: 1,337
Overall 3445 score for this laptop may not be very impressive to an untrained eye but the CPU is actually relatively powerful. The CPU is so powerful that the fan doesn't need to be switched on while playing this old game. The 1337 GPU score means it can not really be a gaming laptop, but should still be able to play some newest games on low settings. The NFS game tested here works smoothly even with the screen being recorded and the game graphics configured to maximum, but this is an antique, so it doesn't mean anything.
The M.2 SSD is fast, and there is another slot for another one. 8GB of ram is a little bit short, but it's DDR4 at 3.2GHZ, and there is another slot for ram upgrade if needed. Battery life is about 11+ hours on the best-battery-life-setting mode. The keyboard of this laptop is great, so this is an ideal laptop for code typing.
You can find a refurbished laptop similar to this one for about $300-400, which can be a good deal if the one that refurbished the laptop is competent enough. The chance that a refurbished laptop gets re-pasted with high quality thermal paste is very low, so it’s better to learn how to refurbish your laptop yourself, since it would need that every few years anyway. The various types of connectors that most laptops use are very fragile, and getting a replacement for a damage cable is next to impossible. Getting the connector on the PCB damaged means it's a goner. It's not a very hard job, but extra care is absolutely needed to dissemble a laptop, and it can be very fun.
General Guides:
-Refurbished laptops have better value than new ones.
-Used laptops have better value than refurbished ones.
-Damaged laptops have better value than used ones.
What to look for for semi-pros:
A laptop in good physical condition, but not powering ON. This could be fixed easily, and laptops that can't be turned OFF most of the time are for sale at a heavily depreciated price. This means that you can buy a high power laptop for a fraction of its original cost this way.
A laptop with a good CPU. laptops generally use integrated GPU within the CPU, so the CPU is the main value to a laptop. The logic board for such a laptop, even when it's heavily damaged, can be salvaged. Some laptops have many variations given the same model, so a high end CPU logic board can be swapped to a lower end case. This would be cheaper instead of buying each individual part, and most of the time, parts can not be individually purchased. This means that you are most likely able to get a good laptop from 2 or more laptops sold as for-parts.
How to tell the good CPU from the bad?
Google the CPU part name, and click on the entry by cpubenchmark. It will show you a multithread and single thread rating. Benchmark score is not 100% accurate, but it gives you a general idea how powerful the CPU is, and so its value. Generally the generation and power is encoded in the CPU name itself. Newer generation is faster and the bigger number is faster than the smaller number.