My 10-year-old Dell XPS laptop finally died. With its core i7, it was pretty hot back in 2013. I replaced its Windows OS with Linux some years ago and it was still performing acceptably.
There were issues, of course. I prefer lightweight devices these days but the XPS is on the beefy side, which means that it has poor battery life. To make matters worse, the battery continued to deteriorate. Before it died, it could only keep a charge for 30 minutes.
I saw the end coming so I bought a refurbished laptop–another Dell. At first, I was happy with the replacement laptop but it kept crashing so I sent it back.
Yesterday I ordered another refurbished laptop, a Thinkpad this time. I’ve liked the Thinkpads that I’ve used in the past; they have the best laptop keyboards. The new (refurbished) Thinkpad is a core i7 but many generations newer; this one is a gen6, which makes it five years old. I plan to put Linux on the new laptop so it should perform well. I got it for $389.
