How to buy a cheap and best Laptop Ultrabook
I decided to buy a laptop after using my pro speced desktop which is my go to computer for essentially everything, well i do own a iPad mini which i mostly used to watch YouTube videos. I wanted something that i could carry around when i travel and it had to be portable, very much typable and it must be good enough to handle full HD videos and video editing.. and decent looks, not too flashy - but classy for sure.. there were quite a few options from the macbook pro's to the dell xps 13" notebook, and then there was the thinkpads! no, not the x1 carbon series, they were beyond my budget. Oh, i forgot - i wanted something CHEAP too!
And then, i bumped on to the thinkpad series.. well i used a 14" thinkpad for office and i quiet like it.. and then i saw a video on youtube in which one of them showed a x240 series and was not very happy with the changed keyboard.. it was a 12.5" compact, performer, just what i wanted.. i then researched on the older models, zeroed in on the x230 thinkpad. and guess what? an used x230 sells on ebay for just under 80 dollars!
Now, these professionally used laptops are actually dumped by companies in lots after 5 yrs of use and are replaced with new ones for their employees. They land up on ebay and are then sold for damn cheap prices.. all it takes is a little bit of understanding of the hardware upgradability and you are good to go. Just make sure you are not picking up the one which says "no OS loaded, only boot screen" - just dont take a chance, go for the one which comes with a HDD and OS loaded and working.
Now this was a TN panel and came with a 4GB single stick RAM and the older HDD. But these can always be upgradable, so i went for it.
On delivery, i realized that that business laptop was sparingly used with minor physical damage to the exterior. It has 2 USB 3.0, 1 USB 2.0, a mini HDMI out, s video out, 3.5mm stereo out, LAN input, wifi and bluetooth, and SD card slot. The USB C was the only miss in this machine.
So, i decided to give this a nice overhaul. This supports upto 16GB RAM, so i got two 8GB DDR 3 sticks, ordered a 500GB SSD, the screen although is TN panel seemed good enough for the time being, yes the color shifts if you are looking at an angle, but that would be very rare for me looking at an angle, so the screen remains unchanged atleast for now.
Finally comes the keyboard, now the x230 was the first model to have the new style keyboards post lenovo acquiring the thinkpad label, it was the same that i used on my office laptop, and it was good - but not the same feel that you get with the thinkpad classic keyboard for sure. So, i ordered the one that was meant for the x220 laptop! Yes, i ordered a older classic version, and i had to do minor modifications inorder to get it fitted to the x230 body. i looked up some forums before i did that, i had to do some pin isolations to the keyboard and some grinding to fit the x230 chasis. And then, finally i was able to use the new.. i mean the classic thinkpad keyboard on the x230! Boy what a pleasure it is to type on that keyboard.
Now my x230 is a i5 3350 - 16GB - SSD 500GB - 12.5" portable monster, with great I/O ports expandability options! the only downside of this laptop is the speakers, they are tweeney and lack any bass whatsoever, since they were meant for productivity. I will figure out a way to replace these with some good bassy speakers that are compatible. If you have any suggesstions, please leave a comment below.