On Fri, 09 Apr 2021 12:22:03 -0600, Dan Marotta wrote:

I would be very leery of a really cheap PC. I bought a $150 Dell
Inspiron 3180 and immediately regretted it. It comes with 32 GB of eMMC
(half of which is reserved as a recovery drive) in place of a disk or
SSD and it is not upgradeable (I tried). The chip is a flat square
package without leads and is installed by assembly machines.

You could also look on eBay for 'pro or 'semi-pro' Lenovo laptops.

I have a 15 year old Lenovo R61i thats running well (new screen, two new
fans, and the original 120GB HDD replaced with a 128GB SanDisk SSD)
though its battery (easily replaceable) is probably down to an hour or
two run time. I don't ca the machine runs on mains 99.9% of the time.
That was bought new.

I also have a 4 year old Lenovo T440, bought off FleaBay for GBP 300 (USD
415) with 8GB RAM and a 500GB HDD and also used every day. No problems
with it at all and a recent check shows its battery is showing no signs
of ageing. This also runs on mains power 99.9% of the time.

Both systems have run RedHat Fedora Linux since about 5 minutes after I
first got my hands on them. All my gliding software runs on them
including the desktop version of LK8000.


--
Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org