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I bought a new laptop recently. I was very close to paying well over £1k on an XPS 13 with an 8th gen quad core i5, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. At some point

I bought a new laptop recently. I was very close to paying well over £1k on an XPS 13 with an 8th gen quad core i5, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. At some point, I came to my senses and bought a used Thinkpad X230 for just £80. I spent £100 on upgrading the RAM and SSD to match those of the XPS I mentioned (I got a rather lucky deal on the SSD). I'm currently planning on spending approximately another £100 on upgrading the display to a 13.3" 1080p IPS panel (which will require some fairly extensive hardware mods). So, for about a quarter of what I was going to spend on the XPS, I have a machine with roughly comparable specs (Significantly weaker CPU, admittedly), but a much more rugged design with upgradable and moddable hardware.

bootloop 8y ago
I think the XPS 13 series is reasonable priced for what you get and I thing you would not have regretted it if you would have went with that option. Your changes sound like too much work for a lot of people but its great that you found something fitting your needs at a significantly smaller price point.
Jasonbe 8y ago
While I applaud your DIY ethics - theres no warranty if parts fail. It also is more effort than most will go though.
dsego 8y ago
That 1k is a week or two of dev work depending on where you live. If you've spent more than a week on procuring that laptop, you haven't actually saved any money.