I have to smile every time I see the refurbished bit in the title of items on here, whether it is a phone or laptop. Second hand is the word, refurbished my foot. how do you refurbish a laptop?. Repair is an option if it is faulty. Refurbished sounds better I guess. Now if they where all as new I might be a bit more convinced but the fact these items are graded, depending on condition tells me they are tested, in other words formatted and OS installed and just tested

This "company" sent me a "refurbished" laptop that was full of coffee....these ARE NOT REFURBISHED...THEY ARE SIMPLY WIPED AND SENT OUT...AVOID!

​"Some guy selling ex lease laptops." He must be a pretty busy guy with 42447 feedbacks on eBay 99% of which are positive?

Refurbished electronics is tested, repaired (if needed) and repacked by an authorised repair centre or manufacturer and in 99% cases it's hard to tell it apart from a brand new device.

This laptop is a beaten, scratched piece of crap with very likely a dead battery sold by some guy selling ex-lease laptops on ebay.

What makes this better than yesterday's 6230 deal?

Refurbished electronics is tested, repaired (if needed) and repacked by an authorised repair centre or manufacturer and in 99% cases it's hard to tell it apart from a brand new device.

This laptop is a beaten, scratched piece of crap with very likely a dead battery sold by some guy selling ex-lease laptops on ebay.

Feedback is that he is rude...

Looks fine to me.

Each of the grades gives you an idea of what you are going to get and the seller has a good feedback score.

Note that the £119.99 is for 4Gb RAM/500Gb disk/Windows 7

Most expensive option is for £8Gb RAM/120Gb SSD/Windows 10 for £164.99

I have to smile every time I see the refurbished bit in the title of items on here, whether it is a phone or laptop. Second hand is the word, refurbished my foot. how do you refurbish a laptop?. Repair is an option if it is faulty. Refurbished sounds better I guess. Now if they where all as new I might be a bit more convinced but the fact these items are graded, depending on condition tells me they are tested, in other words formatted and OS installed and just tested

This "company" sent me a "refurbished" laptop that was full of coffee....these ARE NOT REFURBISHED...THEY ARE SIMPLY WIPED AND SENT OUT...AVOID!

So I can buy this with the normal hard drive, remove the blanking plate, install the hard drive there, get an ssd and install it so I have 2 drives? Or is it better to just get the version with the ssd direct from them?

I need a laptop for my son to take to Uni. If this is going to be hit or miss does anyone know of a cheap laptop similar spec?

Actually I can dispute this from experience.

I bought a 'refurbished' Lenovo android tablet from Argos, one was faulty and send it back, it's replacement was too!
Both were clearly customer returns one of which was not at all new - one had no working wifi which could have been new. I sent it back and it's replacement had a worn out USB socket, which would have only occured after months of use. So they were not refurbished at all as the refurbishing process would have identified this.

In the case of these guys, they will go through the item and thoroughly check the functionality in most cases, and offer some kind of warranty. But that is down to individual sellers.

I would suggest the only time to trust the label refurbished, is when purchased from the original manufacturer, e.g. camera manufactures and printer manufacturers who will sell refurbished goods which you can rely on.

I've had one from these lot, you will get an end of life battery that's been conditioned to last a couple of weeks, and the laptop will be in a well used condition, with a worn out keyboard.
so factor in extra budget for replacements

"Refurbished" means nothing anymore - most of what the high-street stores sell as 'refurbished' are just customer returns (which may or may not have faults and may or may not have been checked for those)

In this case, you're likely looking at the scrag-end of a massive consignment of laptops - the better ones sold for more money as Grade 1 or whatever else - the tatty/scratched/worn ones end-up sold-off cheaply.

That's not to say it won't work and may be fine if you don't mind some marks etc. but buy with your eyes open and be prepared to test it thoroughly, likely have to replace the battery (if you care about that)

At the very least, check it matches your required spec, check the cost of batteries/keyboards/memory upgrades - go into this with eyes FULLY open and shop around, there's LOADS of places selling this stuff and some have better rep than others...

Very good for the specs, got some in past for family, all very happy, one came with brand new battery, was a nice surprise.
Heat

Proceed with eyes open when buying 'refurbished' laptops. These are ex-business machines, some of which have had light use, others trashed. Most batteries will have little capacity left. Do your research first !
1. Choose a make & model with a good rep e.g. older Lenovos X201 and T420s are like tanks, some X1 Carbons are unreliable. I don't know about Dell models.
2. Choose a model for which you can find a hardware maintenance/disassembly manual easily - I have ones for my T420 and T430. As a matter of course, I strip mine, clean throughly and repaste the cpu with Arctic Silver as all the ones I've looked at have dried out thermal paste. I've also replaced a noisy fan with a quieter one.
3. Choose a supplier that people here like - I've bought from Tier One Online, but there are other decent vendors.
4. Don't put up with something that isn't as advertised. The first one from Tier One had a dodgy ethernet socket, but they replaced it quickly, pleasantly and at no cost to me, so guess where i'd go next time.
... and no I have no connection with them ...

Oh, and consider replacing the HDD with an SSD, which brings new life to an old machine. Keep the HDD to backup the machine.

I've got a couple of these and they're built very solidly and are pretty ugly :smiley: , but if battery life is a concern, I'd steer clear - I've owned 2-3 3rd gen Intel Core laptops now and each one has had rather rubbish battery life. The 4th gen and later are so much better for working away from AC power - they'll typically cost nearer to £200 but will usually be in newer condition as well, with less worn batteries. - Sellers like the one in this post typically aren't selling many of the 4th gen or later because they haven't gone ex-lease yet.
I recommend sticking with business class laptops if it needs to last 2-3 years (dell e5440 for instance, or Lenovo T440), they have typically better build quality than consumer laptops that I've seen.

Or maybe that this seller has had dozens of their items posted as good deals by dozens of members with plenty of members posting their positive experience with the seller, who has made 42000 sales and managed to ensure that over 41500 of them are happy with the purchase. I firmly expect you won't reply due to your ego as you refused to reply to anyone asking a reasonable question of you yesterday.


No minor blemishes on the screen is about the only advantage. The differences outside of specifications is this is a larger laptop with the 14inch screen but it won't be a massive size difference. This being an E5xxx series means this is one of the Dell lower tier models that features mostly plastic construction without the fancy metal alloys and so on, however the build quality will be above that of your typical low end consumer laptop that you get for £300. Beyond that it's fairly similar.

My E6330 that I picked up about 18months ago still managed just shy of 3 hours on battery and to be honest most of these sorts of models the batteries are really cheap. Picking up 3rd party batteries on ebay for some can be hit and miss but I've found if you do your research first you can get a decent battery for about £25 that will typically manage to achieve most of what a 1st party battery would.

As to 4th gen and later machines while there are fewer of those options they do still come up as some companies will take out a contract for devices when they start up and these sorts of things have a habit of syncing up with other major bills such as building leases and other major expenses. As a result many will take a slightly more expensive deal to replace their next rollout of hardware for a shorter period so that their budgets are not hammered all in one go. The plus side is for consumers like us we get a good range of quality hardware to pick from. Though the best value in my experience of buying 2nd user business IT kit is found with stuff that's 3-4 years old, this is even more so now the improvements in processors and hardware generally has slowed down year on year and that a 3rd gen i5 is hardly much worse than 6th gen equivalent.

You just have to wonder how much they buy the laptops for in bulk. It would be nice if a non-profit bought the laptops instead and offered them to people on low incomes. Or to anyone.

Are the margins thin? Or are they charging 50-100% more than they paid for them?

decent deal i would say £119 for a dell latitude e5430 3rd gen i5 3320m 4gb ddr3 ram 500gb sata hard drive 14.1 screen hdmi and usb 3

good solid machine with specs that would easily fly through todays tasks no problem for just over a ton

heat added

whats with all the same names repeating their posts from yesterdays other dell 6230 2nd user machine ?

go away an howl at the moon ffs

It depends on the machines in question and their actual value as to what they will pay for them but typically on 3 year old machines the figures I've heard they will pay about £40-50 per unit. However, we're talking about them buying in bulk such as 100 of these often the only knowledge they will have of what they are getting will be seeing them stacked on a pallet, so they are spending often figures of £5000 to buy a batch of machines that may be pretty much scrap or could be hardly used.

When they get the machines they then have to weed through them working out which ones are irreparable and for parts, which ones need repairs, and what ones just need an external clean, drives wiped, any errors dealt with, PAT testing, windows installed, grading them for sale and then repackaging. Obviously all this sorting is time consuming.

While generally machines that are not obviously faulty will get a fairly basic spruce up to take them apart, clean out dust and so on generally is too time consuming even on a large scale so often machines will just get a wipe down. Sellers of these sorts of devices know that there will be duds that get through that buyers wont be happy with but then again if buyers wanted even better guarantees of condition they would also need to expect to pay for the extra expense. Considering an hour of my time when it comes to IT repairs I value at about £20 on an adhoc basis, a company is paying a qualified technician, plus the joys of paying taxes on everything, PAYE, equipment costs, training costs, cost of running a business generally and so forth I think these prices are pretty reasonable.

Whats the difference between this and yesterdays deal on e6230?

which is better please. E6230 or E5430?

The E6230 is lighter and has better build quality, but has a 12" screen and typically a smaller battery
The E5430 is well built but uses more plastic (the screen back is aluminium though and it has magnesium frame internally with plastic covering), it has a 14" screen with the same resolution. Which one is better depends on how well you get on with small screens :smiley:

But surely it doesn't take much to check if a machine is working? Granted, the operating systems may have been wiped, it may be time consuming to check everything but a basic check shouldn't require a professional.

I'm not pointing the finger at the ebay sellers necessarily, just surprised that they'd be sold in bulk without any checks as they'd be worth more. I guess identifying the working ones would decrease the value of the junk ones they're sent with.

they're unlikely to be employing highly skilled and paid technicians to check these, it's probably low skilled/paid peeps that check it boots up and appears to work, probably 3mins including wiping screen/keyboard. At £6 an hour (or whatever min wage is) you are going to see little interest given in proper testing.

Agree that refurbished means customer returns and anything else is second hand.

​About £150 - £200

I wouldn't bother with this one. Many of the people posting positive things about this ebay seller, have in the past themselves, posted deals for this ebay seller. It reeks of self promotion. The company has various trading names too. Decide for yourself.
If the mods would look into this, they will see a link between various user accounts, some that have only joined Hotuk just to list an item or two, than go on to list a laptop from this ebay seller.

If the keyboard is badly worn, complain to the seller and get a refund / part refund. A new keyboard is probably only a tenner and takes 10 mins to fit

EDIT : Just found a brand new one on ebay for £9.45 delivered.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/New-Dell-UK-Keyboard-for-Latitude-E5420-E5430-E6220-E6230-E6430-FWJJ4-/182172241538?hash=item2a6a4fce82:g:7KMAAOSwMNxXYZHQ

Chances are they are getting them for £0 or a few pounds at most IF they are the recycler or an affiliated company of the recyclers. They will have large contracts with big businesses to dispose of all old IT equipment in an Environmentally friendly, and Environmentally legal way, so most of them will have further disposal costs with other equipment (eg the lead in old CRT screens) and what they lose on all of that, they'll claw back on the likes of these. OR they may just buy in bulk from the recycler

I'm curious as to how much cheaper you think computers should be for people on low incomes? And how you would decide who is on a low income and whos just wanting a bargain to resell?

It'll have had to have had the hard disk professionally wiped too, then a fresh install of Windows. All of which takes time.

But yes, thats "refurbished" in the same way as a used car is "refurbished" by a trader by driving it home from auction and giving it a wash.

Its a used laptop, not something that has been restored to new condition.

They'll either be affiliated with the recycler who has deals with big businesses or councils, or they'll buy off them by the pallet load.

By the time you do a boot up, install the OS, etc, you've probably had it running a couple of hours. Thats the extent of the testing. If its been running that long, then chances are its fine. If it blue screens or knocks off, they'll probably use it for spares or sell it on "spares or repair".

Checking it's working is one thing but given the requirements to blank systems (even bulk solutions to this issue) takes time. When corporate machines are retired, most companies outsource the secure data destruction matters to the refurbishing firms or have it agreed in the contract that this will be done on their behalf (many have refurb outlets have 'affiliate' or sister companies which deal with that aspect).

The issue that these firms don't necessarily require trained labour to do the job is true, but the people that are doing it need to be certified that they are trained to do it correctly and an audit trail be in place, especially when these items may contain traces of personal information of 1000's of people.

Sadly a lot of buyers seem to expect it's just a quick couple of minute job to get these machines back up and running ready to be resold, when in fact the process (while a lot of it automated) does take quite a long time and a reasonable amount of work and it's not a case of just slapping it in a new box after wiping down with a wet rag. I seem to remember a blog of one refurbished machine supplier saying it takes on average 3-4 hours to complete the disk wiping, reinstall of windows from an image file and associated tasks on the average laptops they were selling.

As to selling in bulk, it's the main way these places stay in business because buying individually would mean that they can pick and choose. The leasing companies just want to get their money, not faff about trying to offload a batch of broken computers no one wants.


See the above. It's not nearly as simple as you make it sound.


You seem to talk a lot of talk but don't offer any viable alternatives that people could opt for as a viable alternative. Are you still having a strop about yesterday?

Please post some links of the deals posted by people of self promoting this seller. I think you clearly don't understand the meaning of the term, if you feel it's self promotion then there's a report button, I suggest you start collecting the reasoning for your assumptions and report it to the mods and admin to be assessed. Your posting history suggests by the way you seem to assess things that you work for Amazon.......



Or get the backlit one for about £5 more (a well worthwhile upgrade) as I love it on mine.

​Honestly, this will be a "miss"

Get a new one that has maximum battery life at the start ...slowly diminishing with time.

So spend several times the cost of this to save the £20 or so price of a battery? Get real.

Batteries are replaceable items and dont cost a fortune. I stuck one into this cheap Dell i have for £9.99 from a UK supplier with a years warranty.

If the battery is holding no charge at all, the seller should replace it, if its holding charge for an hour or more, chances are it will do for the forseeable future.

Whilst an entry level new laptop can be had for probably £250, its going to be just that - an entry level machine built down to a price and with hard to replace parts. These are proper business spec machines that can take a bit of use and abuse and can easily be upgraded or modded.

I'd have one of these all day long over say a new netbook with 32GB of disk space at this price, and not everyone can afford to / wants to spend hundreds on a laptop.

My son bought himself a £700 Sony laptop to go to university. By year 3 it looked like it had been kicked up and down the street and he then managed to drop it and break the screen. I put a new screen in it for him off of ebay for £70 but i ended up selling it for him for £100 at the end of his university time and was lucky to get that.

Something like this might take a battery or two over that time, but you'll lose an awful lot less on it compared to a new machine, for what is (or should be) just going to be a workhorse during term time,

I see you didn't mention the knackered batteries, so like I said factor in the cost of all the likely replacement parts, and the labour to fit them if you are unable

You have replied to several comments in detail, you sound like the seller to me ! :wink:

Can't speak for others but the E520 I got from this company last November (plus I know two other people who have got them from there without issues), has been great. No problems at all and very happy with it.

I haven't posted on here for quite a while, but given some of the nonsense posted above and as someone who has had experience of this company and similar laptops I thought I'd post my own personal experiences.

I bought my first laptop from newandusedlaptops about December last year as a Xmas prezzie for our student daughter. I think it was a Dell Latitude E6410 - a smart brushed steel covered 14" laptop. The spec was i5 processor, 4GB of RAM and 128GB SSD ROM, with Windows 7 upgrade-able to Windows 10. It cost about £150.

My OH half and I were so impressed after having a play with it to make sure it was a worthy prezzie for our daughter rather than a bag of spanners, that we bought each other one as Xmas prezzies, though ours were the Latitude E6420's, similar but slightly later versions, with exactly the same spec and the same price.

7 months on, here's my take. On delivery I thought they looked fab!, far from the shabby take that some people here think they're getting. Clean, sharp, not even obviously not new, they all looked good to me. I knew that the batteries weren't new and had been expecting to operate them on mains only rather than pay for replacements, but even now, they all charge up to full within the hour and last 3/4 hrs under heavy work.

As they're ex-business lappies the build quality is superb, I've dropped mine umpteen times off the sofa and bed expecting it to never sing again and it's chirped up time and time again. The SSD is a money well spent upgrade - even if you go for the ( now small-ish ) 128GB version as the fire-up time is rapid and everything is blisteringly fast even with ( again now small-ish ) 4GB RAM.

The only negative experience I've experienced amongst the 3 laptops was that one of the cables doesn't seem to work too well. As the other 2 are interchangeable and as mentioned before, charge up quickly and the charged life is good, we just interchange.

In summary I feel like we've got 3 x £500 laptops. They still look sharp, despite abuse and perform well. I didn't get the feeling any of them were runts of the litter or cast-offs. They don't feel plasticcy or cheap - au-contraire. They were £1000+ once for a reason, i.e. their build quality, and much of that build quality still shines through.


I love this site and as a fellow bargain hunter I just felt the need to share what, in my opinion has been my best " bang per buck " purchase ever. Yes, it wasn't brand new, but it looked very new. It wasn't the latest spec, but by god it was faster than any other laptop I've owned. And 7 months on I still feel smug as I type on my purchase... If it died in the next 6 months I'd happily repurchase another.

Just a real world take from a real world person. I'll leave the spec analysis to the spec nerds, but at £150 (in my case) - I know this particular example is a slightly lesser version, at about £30 cheaper - I'm a very happy bunny. Maybe if there's complaints about the quality at this price point, and they really are selling the very worn versions off for about £30 cheaper, just spend the extra £30 and get a good value experience.

Btw, I have no connection with them, but if they wish to donate a more recent refurbished model for my consideration and reviewal I'd be happy to put it through it's paces :-).

With regards to the cable issue you experience which machine is that on? The E6410 and E6420 should have compatible power supplies to check if the issue is on the laptop side or the charging cable side. If it's the latter a new quality power supply can be had for under £20.

If the issue happens to be the former then the problem is likely to be damage to the charge port and both these models are fairly easy to repair as this is not soldered to the motherboard but happens to be a separate component that costs about £5. You can reasonably make the repair yourself, a bit of confidence in yourself and some time is all you will need. There are a couple of guides that can help you to do it step by step. Failing that there are plenty of Tech nerds who would be able to do it. If you happen to be local to Hertfordshire/Essex boarders I'd do it for £10 if you can supply the laptop and the part required to fix it.

I expect a certain someone is going to now accuse you of being the seller of the laptops despite the seller having only popped up a long time after you joined HUKD. BTW you should join the discussion more often as it's comments like your one that really help people make buying decisions because it's critical of the purchase you made, you don't sing it's praise entirely but you do outline why you're happy/not happy with it. You'd certainly be a welcome asset to the community even if you only post infrequently.

I think it was the cable itself that was a bit worn Astec, as the other 2 from 3 interchange fine. Such a small irritant for me we just interchange the other 2 cables as they're mostly used from home. I could've been a pedant and demanded a replacement but I would have felt a bit greedy. Very happy overall and if I feel the need for a third cable i wouldn't begrudge buying a generic one should the need arise. Thank you for your helpful reponse.

Balance, I hope is what this site is all about, so my post was an attempt to give a fair assessment of some really good laptops, for fear that some would be scared off by others' negativity. Look at the quality vs the cost. There has to be some trade-off, but I think the negatives are few and the positives far outweigh... If I were to give an honest valuation of the 3 laptops I bought, despite them not being new even when bought, I would say, even 7 months on they'd be worth about £250 each, and to buy similar spec, but inferior build quality new - about £350, and add a couple of hundred quid for same build quality new.

Hence me feeling the need to share at what I believe are great value purchases for us.

Forgot to mention it was one of the 6420 cables that was faulty.

Batteries are probably no more than £20 for a decent after market one with a warranty. Also chances are the battery in it is working fine as is.

There is no labour in fitting a battery they just unclip from the back. I'd no idea how to change the keyboard on my d620 but there was a guide on youtube and it took 10 mins to replace. Ram just plugs in the back and hard drives are on two screws. It's all easy stuff on the business quality kit.

By comparison I've also an hp envy 13 i7 with 8gb ram and a 256 gb ssd and it's a pig to work at. The ram is soldered in and it's a hassle to get to the hard drive.

And no I'm not the seller. Just someone who is an advocate of ex business computers having bought quite a few over the years.

Bemused thay those people who say stuff like this is **** aren't ever asked for their real world experience of the kit or the seller and those who have had good experiences of buying used kit are automatically labelled as the seller.. . : rolleyes:

For the price you can't beat them. And the bonus is enterprise stuff is generally easily serviceable. Personally the battery life is all that pains me. Need far more than what most of these will ever give even with aftermarket stuff.

I had this laptop in previous workplace, with the 1600 x 900 resolution screen and a SanDisk 240GB SSD.
Good laptop, durable.

Pity I wasn't allowed to take it with me, after 3 years use it was immaculate.

An SSD drive will help as there are no moving parts, compared to spinning up and spinning down a hard disk, but you're right, they're never going to give fantastic outputs in terms of usage.

I'm never really far away from a mains source for this D620 so its not a problem. I get about 2 hours out of the £9.99 battery i put in it so more than happy.

Just because i have only posted one deal previously doesn't mean i have any links towards this ebay seller. In fact this will be my first purchase with them!
I was only posting as it looks like a great deal.
i have 2 dell latitude 1st gen i5 laptops (bought from cash converters by the way for about £100 previously) that are more than capable of doing everyday tasks, basic video editing with windows movie maker, photo editing, sound editing, video playback - not sure about 4k playback as i haven't tried it as yet (fine with a 2k video file i tried)... and emulation - just tried dc emulation and handles the games i have tried so far. So this laptop should find these a breeze...
I have an e4310 which can get a little warm and a e6410 which is great but power supply died on me after about 6 months. Think there may be problems with the slim type so i purchased a third party one from amazon - nerd herd for about £17-18 which is fine for the last couple of months...

The advantage of an SSD is generally going to be about 10% better battery life at best according to most testing of windows based laptops that I've seen. While it's an improvement it's not exactly amazing. For a 2 hour battery life like you said about that works out to 2 hours and 12 minutes so most people really won't see much of an advantage in that. However like you have said before an SSD is one of the best upgrades in terms of speeding up any computer.

I would have thought it was more but if that's what the figures are showing that's interesting

You're right though - an older machine like this with older battery technology is not going to meet your specific needs.

Anyone received theirs yet?

Ordered the 5430 with the SSD, 6GB memory and Windows 10 on Tuesday, it arrived Thursday afternoon. Very pleased with it, it's absolutely spotless.. The keyboard looks new, there are shiney usage spots on the touchpad and mouse buttons and very faint hairline scratches here and there although not on the screen and you have to look for them. Ran memtest and everything checked out. The battery charges quickly with the supplied Dell charger and lasts over three hours.Slight niggle is the HDMI slot needs a bit of wiggling to make a connection but it works and i see from Googling that's not a rare complaint. Another vendor is selling a very similar machine and spec for £300, twice what this supplier asks. On the basis of this purchase I'd thoroughly recommned this deal.

£319.99 now - expired :disappointed:

Glad I've checked out the comments here. def giving this a miss and just buying a new one!

You've no choice. The deals over.

If you're happy spending the price of a new one, then go ahead, i cant argue with that - its not like i havent done it. i've both the two D620s and a new HP Envy 13 i7 with 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD which was top of the range when i bought it six months ago. Ironically - and the point i've been trying to get across - you dont need the power for general use. the HP Envy performs exactly the same functions for me as the Dell D620 does buy the dell does it for 1/10th of the price.

You pays your money....

​fair point and all i needed it for was generally just ripping cds and itunes as i have a mbp for general and dj use. Any other recommendations?

A lot of the newer laptops dont have DVD writers - for example this HP Envy doesnt - so a decent used one might be best? I'd be looking for a Dell or HP machine, i3 or i5 and if it hasnt got 4GB RAM factor in for an upgrade (i bought 2x2GB RAM sticks second hand for the D620). SSD Drives are cheap - 120GB should cost you less than £25 and a 240GB can now be had for under £50.

I guess just check around ebay. The two D620s i have cost me £26.50 each delivered. Though i'd to add hard drives, PSUs and batteries, but they're pre i3s.

​Thank you mate. sounds like the route i might take. :smiley:

Mines arrived and its a belter. Virtually brand new with a great battery. Bad luck those who didn't gamble.

What type of battery did it arrive with - 6 cell? How many hours are you getting out of it?

Same here, just got it off the courier. Laptop is in good nick with a couple of minor dings and scratches on the case. Nothing unusual for a 2nd hand machine. The screen looks good and has no scratches or dead pixels. Keyboard, palmrests and touchpad are in good nick. System specs are as I bought on the listing and battery is showing up as 80% full with 5.5 hrs remaining. I will leave the machine on for a while to see if the battery figure changes significantly. So far I'm pretty pleased with it for the price.

Well I tested the battery by running HD video, playing games, etc. It ran for around 4.5 hours. The battery section in the BIOS is indicating it has around 90% charge. Perhaps I lucked out.

I also opened the access panel on the bottom to check the condition of the laptop (impressed with that, only two screws and slide off the panel and you have access to most things you need). Very little dust present, even in the fan area. Some interesting things I noted, the laptop I got has a blanking plate in place of where the dvd drive usually is (not a problem, this was stated in the listing), but I noticed in the battery status indicator on windows, it has two mentions for batteries (the primary one, and a mysterious #2 batt which is currently disconnected). I'm wondering if the laptop can have a battery connected via the bay, such as with Thinkpads you could add different things via the ultrabay.

The other thing that I saw was that removing the bottom access panel gives you direct access to the cpu and the heatsink, etc. So I'm wondering if the cpu can be replaced. Time to google...

Sorry if I am rambling lol, and before anyone accuses me of being affiliated with the company, I am not. I'm just a bit of a geek who is glad to finally be away from an older laptop with a T4400 processor.

@zxzx, I don't think your rambling. I think its good to share any points/comments that we have with the individual laptops that we received. It will give people an idea of the kind of thing to expect if they order from this seller.

I just picked mine up too and in the process of playing around with it.

My early impressions are, for the money I'm satisfied so far. Mine isn't in the greatest condition but functionally seems good. I would have described mine as more Grade 3 than 2 according to their own criteria.

Mine has been 'cleaned' but its like a rush job. You can see the big streaks on the screen where they have wiped it down. Not a biggy for me cos I will do it, but its small things like this that would cost them nothing to do and leave a bigger impression to the customer.

2 of the rubber feet on the bottom are missing and there is lots of residue from sticky labels that they couldn't be bothered to remove. Not a biggy again as I will put some nail varnish remover on it.

There seems to be a screw missing on the bottom, but whatever it 'screws' down doesn't seem to affect things. I may leave it or see if they will send me one.

Mine appears to be repaired, like the chassis was moved into another case or something as the seams between them don't look good and flush, with lots of scuffs that don't seem like they would be there under normal wear.

On the plus side, mine seems to be the HD+ version with 1600 x 900 resolution. I also got a DVD drive with mine but haven't checked if its ROM or a writer.

The SSD supplied seems to be an Adata. Feels responsive but I will run some benchmarks later.

These don't have a DVD bay battery unfortunately. That's very much the proviso of Lenovo but a feature I think many would enjoy having available.

The 2nd battery refers to what's called the slice battery that offers 10-12 hours of battery life. Sadly it's also very expensive as I've never seen one under £80.

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&sku=312-1351&mfgpid=226247

You can upgrade the processor if you wanted to, but the price of replacement processors in the mobile market isn't great but value for money is down to your opinion.

Thanks for the information and yeah, a bit pricy for me. I will stick to firing an SSD (one of those sub 25 quid ones) in there and upgrading to 16gb RAM over time.

We are talking about reputable retailers though arent we, such as Argos, Tesco rather than chancers buying a pallet of used laptops and wiping them over with a damp cloth. Both Argos and Tesco sell laptops new so you have a fair chance of getting a decent one that is described as refurbished.

That's unfortunate, maybe you should message them and see if you get a better one (though I know I'd be annoyed at the hassle myself)

That reminds me, I will have to run Recuva and see how thoroughly they have erased the old data. Not that I care personally since I am happy with the laptop I have, but it would prove interesting I'm sure.

I'm in two minds to return or not. It's a hassle for one and I think I need to pay the postage. Then what happens if the replacement is just as bad, or worse?

I've been testing and it works really well. For the price and the fact they offer a warranty, I still think they are just worth the money.

I went with the SSD option and I'm assuming its brand new replacement to the old hard drive. It's an Adata SP550. I ran AS SSD benchmark on it and compared it to my now very old first SSD, a Crucial M4, in my main Desktop PC and the Adata beats it on speed so I'm very pleased with that.

I've done a first run through on battery life. From 100% to when it turned ifself off, I got 2 hours 40 minutes. With just over one hour of movie playback from USB stick, web-browsing, benchmarking, installing programs, re-boots, etc.

And with a price to match - try getting an i5 laptop off them and see what they charge.