Am I getting scamed? Lenovo T420s

Okay so I have a deal with a guy I found on craigslist for a lenovo T420s for a negotiable price of $230 the laptop has a functioning 6-cell battery that last for 3 - 4 hours and a terabyte hard drive with windows 7 home premium on it, also it comes with 4 gigs of RAM It lacks the nvida GPU. I am planing to upgrade all of this so that it has 8 gigs and an I7 with a 9 cell battery and to take out the dvd burner and throw in an SSD. Am I being scammed? I have looked around at least on craigslist and some people offer it for cheaper but the hard drive is 320 gigs. Should I go lower?

-Omega

The only thing i find fishy is the Windows; Thinkpads, ever since I remember were factory outfitted with the pro verions of windows. So Win7 Pro OEM should be on the machine (unless he bought it without OS, and bought the Home premium key seperately).

If you actually going to change most of the changable parts, I would look way closer on the body (scratches, cracks, ... ) if your going to replace the HDD with a SSD and put the HDD into the ultrabay you can save some $ and go with one that has less HDD space.

I found a simliar one over here for ~ 250€, so I think the asked 240USD are not a scam.

well he said he could go down to 220 to 190-180, and he said that it comes with windows on it, he assured me it had windows

Seems fine to me, there was a cheaper model that came with 2gb ram and windows home premium, so he probably just upgraded the ram.

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I only payed 169 for mine but it has a 250gb hard drive.

My recommendation would be to add more ram. I max out all 4 gb on mine all the time. They only problem is it only has one ram slot. So you will have to have an 8gb stick.

It has 2 ram slots.

hmmmmmmm

From the horses mouth: https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/documents/pd015743

Look under the keyboard...

Edit: Strike that, it's the 420 that keeps the second slot under the keyboard. I don't get to work on too many s series Thinkpads. Both of the 420s' ram slots are under the access hatch: https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/documents/pd008718

It was under the keyboard. Whoever put it there is retarded.

Also for future reference there's a screw on the bottom that holds the keyboard on. The disassembly guide I followed didn't tell me and I bent my keyboard a little.

So I found another guy who can get me a T420 for $200 with a i5 2540m and has a terabyte of storage, get a better deal

Is there a particular reason you're in the market for cheap 5-year-old laptops?

for double the price you can get a serviceable modern laptop that will last ANOTHER 5 years instead of currently being on it's deathbed... better investment? And you wouldn't have to replace all the internals and dead battery?

Lol the t420 is much better than any new laptop.This is probably the best laptop I've ever owned.

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well, I have not that much cash, In the ball park of 310 at most if I counted right, and I want a lot a descent amount of power, in a laptop form factor, so lenovo seems like the best bet, because I like the style and feel of there old ibm/lenovo laptops that are business grade, and with an older gpu, and an older i5 or i7 I can get something of a gaming experience and have some leg room for doing stuff, I want to get some more shit done with VMs and start giving myself more leg room to experiment, and this is coming from a freshman in highschool so money is tight so getting that xeon is not an option so this seemed like a good fit.

@DrunkenPanda

2nd gen i5 is nowhere near its deathbed, least for everyday tasks.

Depends a bit on the rest of the hardware inside.
But sofar it sounds fine to me, wenn they are in perfect working order.
If you upgrade your ram to lets say 8GB, and it has a dualcore or better.
Then they are still fine for most normal tasks.
Ofc these are no gaming machines what so ever.

Oh, that one must have been US only I guess; never saw that offered in Europe. (or I simply missed it)

Slightly out of topic I wouldn't use any OS that came with a second hand computer. It's unknown, anything could be on it, its not trustworthy.

On the fun side, second hand hard drives tend to be poorly wiped. You could get interesting info off it.

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Extract key - reinstall - save

even better, they just wiped the documents, not the OS, at least at the things I have seen, they haven't figured out what DBAN is, so it's always fun to see what they are looking at, "Oh hey, your into BDSM" fun shit like that

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DO NOT trust that OS. A common scam was to have a hacked version of Windows installed on these older laptops, and have a keylogger or something of the sort installed. The first thing you want to do is install a fresh version of windows, and NOT use any BOOT cd's that they give you. Considering that this laptop doesn't even come with the correct version of Windows that the laptop originally came with, there is a distinct possibility of this!

These run Intel HD3000. Unless you are playing games from 15 years ago, or VERY simple 2d games, gaming is basically out of the question. No, seriously, 3d is laughably bad, and even on the lowest settings at 720p you will often not hit playable FPS on even somewhat modern games. My laptop has a dedicated GPU with the k2000m, and even that will barely struggle with playable FPS on low settings with games like Diablo III and Starcraft II on 1080p. These are built to be workstations, not gaming machines. For me, I use this for programming, homework, movies, music, and old school roms/emulators on the go, so for me, it is perfect. Again, GAMING = NO.

Now that I am done with the disclamer on some big issues, onto other issues! YAY, isn't this fun!? Also keep in mind the t420s is slightly different than the t420.

  • The t420s has a soldered CPU, so it is NOT upgradeable
  • t420s has a USB 3.0 Port, while the t420 does not. It also lacks a couple ports the t420 has, though I can't remember which
  • the s can NOT take the larger extended batteries the t420 can, though it can take a three-cell battery in the expansion bay for a total of 6 cells. Note that these tend to die very quickly and often need replacement more often than regular batteries due to power management on the laptop.
  • The regular t420 can be upgraded to a 9 cell for better battery life
  • The s uses a thinner standard for its optical drive/HDD/SSD expansion drives, meaning your upgrades may be limited, and not all normal 2.5" drives will pop right in.
  • the t420s tends to thermo-throttle
  • Most people regret getting the t420s, and prefer either the t420 for a better overall laptop, or a x220 for a smaller laptop with a better screen

Now with all that said, I was in the exact position you are in now, and I myself ended up getting a w520 with a quadcore i7-2720QM, upgraded to 16GB of ram, a 1TB SSD, and a 256GB SSD. I freakin love this thing to death. The keyboard is everything people said it was and then some, the red nipple is so much better than a trackpad that I never want to go back, the screen is WAAAAY better than the t420/430 series its almost laughable (I got the 1080p version), it has a MUCH faster CPU and the cooling to handle it that I never have had any performance issues on this laptop (several people who upgraded to a quad core i7 on the t420 had issues with thermos), and I can have up to 32GB of DDR3 1866 ram, 3 hard drives (though 2 run at SATA 2 speeds), an ethernet port, Displayport, VGA, ect. Considering it is the only computer I have at the moment, I couldn't be happier, other than possibly moving to the t460p that just got announced, not so much for a speed upgrade, rather for a size downgrade while maintaining the current speed I have...ok maybe the integrated graphics will improve, but as mentioned before, I don't use anything that would benefit from that; this w520 is not a small thing, but damn do I love it.

My recommendation if I were in your shoes would be an x220 with IPS display (MAKE SURE it says IPS), or if you absolutely need some processing power, a t420. I would pass on the t420s. Also, if you have the budget, a t520 and w520 are also great machines too.