Manufacture Refurb Laptops

Looking for a "new" laptop for my wife. She currently has a refurbed Lenovo N586 that has 8Gb of RAM in it and the AMD A6 APU. It has issues freezing and booting as its been abused.

Looking for a place to buy manufacture refurbs that look and function like new.

Am looking for something 14" or smaller, i5, 4Gb (PC3-12800) of RAM or less, Windows 7 x64 OS, and 120Gb SSD. Newegg has some Dell E6420's that meet the bill, but the reviews leave a sour taste in my mouth with only 90 day warranties and terrible customer service from the authorized refurb centers if they are missing parts/dont function and its not worth the risk to me.

If the RAM is PC3-12800 that is a bonus as I can remove the RAM from her existing machine and replace it in the new one so amount of RAM is not important. I could care less if it even came with RAM.

Looking to spend less than $300. Something along the lines of the Lenovo T410, T420, Dell E6420's, etc. would be perfect.

 

Have you tried a clean install? Because a pc can't really just go bad. If the laptop got VERY hot for a VERY extended length of time, it could degrade to the point where it's unstable at stock speeds. But that's HIGHLY unlikely. Resetting the bios to defaults could help too. A stick of ram or the hard drive could have gone bad as well.

PC3-12800 is just the speed. Any laptop that uses DDR3 sodimm ram will be able to use the ram you have.

 

My kids have abused it physically, its been dropped, kicked, stepped on. Its easier to buy a new refurb than try to salvage what she currently has. We have a 2TB NAS so backups of what she has are not important as she works from the NAS.

 

I don't have any suggestons on where to buy the laptop, but I highly recommend you get a Lenovo ThinkPad due to their outstanding quality and reliability. My last few laptops which I have used daily have all been used ThinkPads.

 

I second roger_m about Thinkpads, although Dell Latitudes are nice too. I would stick with second-gen i5 or newer since there was a big performance jump from the first-gen. If you want to buy it for cheap, just buy it from a reliable eBay vendor with thousands of feedbacks at 99% or better, if it breaks within 45 days you can complain and most legit sellers will be willing to help you. NewEgg is a rip-off, Amazon is ok.

 

The MSP I work for is a registered Lenovo vendor. I will see if maybe they have some kind of refurb program. I am ok spending $200 and upgrading the SSD myself as well. Anything to save a buck.

 

Lenovo outlet. Quality has always been great. Occasionally they have ridiculously good deals if you are luck and fast you can snatch one for your wife.