If you get a good one. I've been burned so many times now by people selling something they know has problems. They often don't manifest during the "test drive." It sucks.

Refurbished by a reputable re-seller always seems to work well for me, altho it adds a bit to the cost.

I've picked up i5(2600)/8g/500G laptops for 150 like this on several occasions.

And who is a reputable reseller of old ThinkPads? It seems like it's the wild west in the market and I am interested in an old reliable ThinkPad with an expansion slot for an ssd.

I've had good luck so far (knock wood) with Newegg...let me find a link...

https://www.newegg.com/Laptop-Notebooks/RefurbishedStore/ID-...

Sounds great, thanks for the link.

Yahoo auctions in Japan is reliable. They also ship overseas.

The advantage of a T- or X- series is that they are common fleet models so you can buy from a bulk reseller that is less likely to be passing off a single dud.

Is there a specific bulk reseller that you use that you could recommend?

What kind of issues do people conceal?

I got a refurb Thinkpad and:

1. Battery puked out pretty quickly, so that's $100 (AUD) to fix on a $500 second hand laptop.

2. Some keys stopped working, could be bad luck as laptops have shite keyboards normally.

Both are not necessarily concealed issues BUT this is the kind of shit you are dealing with with second hand laptops and the savings don't seem to justify it, for me anyway. Plus less NSAWare.

The main benefit of buying second hand is the 'good for the environment' feeling it gave me.

What kind of NSAware are you worried about, and why do you think buying new would lessen those chances?

While a refurbisher could potentially insert malware, they're not going to do it for the NSA.

Old Thinkpads are also generally well supported by libreboot/coreboot, so that's one less attack vector to worry about.

Oops. Textual screwup. I meant less NSAware as a plus for the older laptop.

The keyboard at least might be a cheap fix. I got a new Thinkpad and the right-hand shift key was useless which is the one I use. I couldn't be bothered returning it and bought a keyboard off ebay. About 5 - 10 mins to install and its great now.

You can actually deactivate the Intel ME on the older thinkpads, so thats better if you are worried about NSAWare.

Some enterprise IT departments have piles of them, if you have connections.