I am interested to hear from other like minded folk.
My partner needs a personal laptop for word docs and other standard stuff so I purchase her a refurb laptop under $400 on ozb sale, after 4 years I sell it for $200 and buy her a new refurb laptop for $400 and I plan to repeat this cycle. Is $50 a year fair for use of a laptop or should I change my plan.
What’s your PC Replacement plan?
Why do you need to get a new one every 4 years if you just need it for word docs and other standard stuff? Just invest in a decent one now and it'll last a lot longer than that.
Doesn't even need to be that decent to last four years for word docs and internet browsing.
Not sure you could do much better than you are now.
Absolutely no point wasting money on anything new for that use case.
I plan to repeat this cycle
Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future performance.
Why replace it after 4 years. Just keep using it.
That’s the thing I was trying to see what others did. My logic was to replace the old one while it still had value.
Does she/you need a laptop? Why not a desktop? Lots of desktop deals often on OzBargain, cheaper than a laptop too (with display, peripherals and all).
Will last longer in general too and you can potentially upgrade down the track if need be.
I got given an old l7 laptop about 3 yrs ago. Was back in the windows 7 days so is minimum 8 yr old. From a quick google I'm guessing 13 years. works quite well for everything I do, word docs, Web browsing, youtube etc. I can see me using it another 10 years if it keeps working.
Only thing I done was put an ssd in it. Well worth the investment.
Is this but with 6gb ram
https://www.google.com/amp/s/icecat.biz/amp/p/vendorName/mpn…
A refurbished unit that's round $400 would be 2018ish model sold with a warranty and proper testing. To sell that after 4 additional years of use would make it reeeeally hard to get more than $100.
When buying refurbs, use them til they die. Then fix them and keep going if you're able.
Still using a 2012, 2nd gen i5 laptop. Changed to SSD around 4 years ago. Recently feel that it cannot cope, upgraded to 16GB ram, feeling better now.
Cannot convince myself that I need another one, even a refurb one.
And the funny story is, at the airport when taking the laptop out for scanning, the officer told me to "separate the 2 laptops, cannot stack them together.". Guess they have not seem a old laptop that is almost 3cm thick. I am using a Thinkpad T420.
PC replacement strategy, buy a latest one on sale with a set budget. Use it for few years, repeat. Give away or resell the old one.
I purchase second hand business grade laptops, my current one a dell latitude e6430 cost $100 from fb marketplace a couple of years ago and is more than capable of running any office suite. I personally just use it to stream media. The one before this was another dell e5410 which cost me $120 inc shipping in 2014, still works and is still very competent at running any office suite; I only upgraded because I wanted a larger screen.
I much prefer to stick to business grade laptops as I have worked on the hardware of many laptops and I find that the easiest ones to work on are the business models, plus replacement parts are generally cheaper.
As you can see, I use them far beyond their expected life and if they don't support the latest windows OS, I just don't use that os. The e6430 runs windows 10 fine but I am currently testing chrome os flex edition on it at the moment.
Best of luck.
$200 after 4 years further use.. optimistic..