Looking to buy second hand laptop, most likely Lenovo ThinkPad T520 W510

[ainarssems]

Hi All.

I have retired my desktop PC and looking to buy another second hand laptop for family use. I would like to spend £100-200 depending on configuration and then some on top of it if RAM needs adding or to upgrade to SSD. Two models I have in mind are Lenovo T520 or W510. I have had several T40 series in the past among a lot of other makes and I do still have X201T with i7, 8GB RAM, 240GB SSD and it is great. I just need another laptop now and would like a bit bigger screen and a bit newer.I do like IBM/Lenovo business class offerings and they have served me well in the past but so it makes sense to stick to them but I am open to other alternative suggestions, especially if I can get something lighter without compromising other parameters.

The things I am looking for are build quality and reliability, decent performance, i5 or i7 CPU, 14-16" matte screen with full HD resolution or close to it (like 1920x900 ), HDMI or DisplayPort, at least 1 USB3 port. If it does not come with it I will update RAM to 8GB and HDD to SSD.

I will appreciate any comments about the 2 models mentioned or any alternative suggestions.

 

[hang-the-9]

Those systems will be very similar in speed, either one is fine. The W510 is more likely to have a faster CPU, it also has 4 RAM slots and should have a higher res screen. For reliability, the T and W models are very good, but it also depends on how they were treated during use since they are well over 3 year old systems.

 

[ainarssems]

Ended up with T 440, bought it because got a good deal as it has Crucial BX100 1TB SSD drive in it. Selling SSD on ebay now as I do not need that much storage space and will get cheaper smaller SSD, thinking about Samsung Evo 750 250GB. It turned out that laptop still has 284 days of warranty left as well.

Not sure if I will keep T440 as there are a couple things I do not like that much, maybe I will get used to it. The things I don't like the most are touchpad and screen.