I bought a refurbished T410 from Ebay with an i7, discrete GPU and 1440x900 display, for like $250, and put a SSD in it. The big limitations of this model are:

I bought a refurbished T410 from Ebay with an i7, discrete GPU and 1440x900 display, for like $250, and put a SSD in it. The big limitations of this model are: - Display has poor contrast - Even with discrete GPU, worse performance than modern integrated graphics - it can drive 1080p monitors and play old and some indie games, not much more than that - Max 8GB of RAM - No USB 3 (but I have a USB 3 express card which works ok) - Not great battery life - more recent CPUs are not THAT much faster but they are less power-hungry Its upsides are: - Classic thinkpad keyboard and clit mouse (if you're into that) - Cheap, easy to find refurbished accessories (though I don't know for how much longer this will be true) For my use (mostly development on Ubuntu), it works pretty well. For computation heavy stuff I remote into a 6-core Dell Precision I got refurbished for $400 (DDR3 ECC RAM is cheap as dirt). Unless you have particular needs for high-perf CPU or GPU, or want extra-long battery life I'd buy a refurb and throw an SSD in it over buying a brand new laptop every time.