Anyone here have experience with buying refurbished ThinkPads from Amazon sellers? I may be in need of another Windows laptop soon and I'm trying to keep the replacement below $500. Been looking at the perennial recommendation, T480.

If anyone has another recommendation for me, I'm open. The reasons I gravitate towards ThinkPads are the quality keyboard and overall good construction. I repaired more of them than I could count back in my PC tech days, but that was back in the '90s when they were made by IBM.

Requirements:

High quality keyboard
1080p resolution min
RAM expandable to 32 GB+
m.2 NVMe slot
Second storage slot (could be PCI-E or m.2)
NOT a Chromebook

Everything else is just a nice to have.

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@voltronic ThinkPad is the closest thing to those requirements. I purchased a refurb T480s last year or 500$ with 1TB HD and 24GB ram and it is my freebsd daily driver.

@matuzalem @voltronic

check out matuzalem... running FreeBSD on the desktop...no wait...FreeBSD *BETA* on the desktop...

😎👍

and yeah volt...the T480 was the last great thinkpad...I had one...the T500s were a step down in build quality (IMHO)...and the initial P series (P50) were super shitty build (my current n-1 laptop is a P50)

@opie @voltronic Tried windows 11 and Linux mint. Everything works fine with the T480 on those OSes, but I can't stand not to use FreeBSD when on a PC. It has all the tools I want.

@matuzalem @voltronic

I scratch that itch by sshing to my many fbsd boxes from my linux laptop... 😁

@opie
ICYMI, I just ordered the exact model @matuzalem has. It will be a Win11 machine mostly, but I'll put WSL on it for Linux funsies.

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