Computer help

[rodheadlee]

I am forced to buy a new laptop. What is the least expensive laptop for shopping, banking, listening to music and some document work. Thanks for your help. 

Edited April 3 by rodheadlee

[Pyreaux]

I looked into it once. They have these old "student" laptops on ebay. They are cheap because they have no space for anything.

Windows machines are in the $50–$80 range, they have small 32GB or 64GB drives. Windows 7 or 10 takes up about 20–25GB. Once you add system updates, temp files, and a few basic apps, you are left with almost nothing. Sellers often refurbish old enterprise or school laptops (like the Dell Latitude or HP ProBook series) and put the cheapest possible drive in them just to get them to boot.

ChromeOS is essentially just a web browser, the operating system is very tiny (usually under 10GB). Lenovo 100e or Dell Chromebook 11 for as low as $50 to $70. Google stops sending security updates to older models after a certain date. On eBay, very cheap $30–$40 Chromebooks are often past this date.

For music, get a microSD card (if it has a slot) or a tiny USB drive can give you at least an extra 64GB–128GB of storage for about $15, which is enough for photos, documents, and mp3s. Never buy a used microSD card with "1TB" for cheap, they often be corrupted.

[telnetd]

On 4/3/2026 at 7:31 PM, rodheadlee said:

I am forced to buy a new laptop. What is the least expensive laptop for shopping, banking, listening to music and some document work. Thanks for your help. 

I would suggest a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad from Amazon or your local computer store.  
Minimum ram 16 GB, 256 GB SSD drive.  It is more than enough for all your needs. It will most 
likely come with Windows 11. I suggest repartitioning the drive and do dual boot with Linux 
Mint. You can then install LibreOffice (free) for your document needs. If you decide to stick
with Windows 11, debloat it to make things faster. One good tool is from Chris Titus.  I haven't
bought new in years.

[Pyreaux]

13 hours ago, telnetd said:

I would suggest a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad from Amazon or your local computer store.  
Minimum ram 16 GB, 256 GB SSD drive.  It is more than enough for all your needs. It will most 
likely come with Windows 11. I suggest repartitioning the drive and do dual boot with Linux 
Mint. You can then install LibreOffice (free) for your document needs. If you decide to stick
with Windows 11, debloat it to make things faster. One good tool is from Chris Titus.  I haven't
bought new in years.

How is LibreOffice? I use OpenOffice. OpenOffice has the basics Word and Excel and Powerpoint, it will open, edit and make new .Doc files so you switch between Microsoft Office. An optional patch of "Languages" I never used. It has a small spell checker dictionary, missing some proper nouns, but you can just click it to add it to the internal dictionary.

Got any cheap security solutions? Once upon a time I used free Spybot. I'm having less trouble now days, today I just use a secure browser (any non-Explorer, like Firefox) set to not open links or new windows without permission or not automatically download things. I guess it's less needed. I guess I'm still troubled by the tracking cookies telling my streaming services about products I am thinking about. 

Edited April 6 by Pyreaux

[Rain]

Here in Tempe ASU has a place where they sell stuff they are not using - computers, monitors, chairs, file cabinets, office things and then random things like mugs, balls or who knows. You might check any college near you to see if they have something like that. 

[rodheadlee]

Ok, here is what I have.

An HP that is 10 years old with a Pentium 1.1GHz processor, 4GB Ram, 466 GB storage with 166GB used.

The problem is I accidentally started the OneDrive program and it's been really slow since then. The other problem is if I try to use MS  Word the cursor jumps all over the place it's impossible to type up a document. I suppose it could have a virus I don't know. Today ended my 10 years of support so I have to upgrade to Windows 11 or do something different.

[telnetd]

On 4/5/2026 at 3:41 PM, Pyreaux said:

How is LibreOffice? I use OpenOffice. OpenOffice has the basics Word and Excel and Powerpoint, it will open, edit and make new .Doc files so you switch between Microsoft Office. An optional patch of "Languages" I never used. It has a small spell checker dictionary, missing some proper nouns, but you can just click it to add it to the internal dictionary.

Got any cheap security solutions? Once upon a time I used free Spybot. I'm having less trouble now days, today I just use a secure browser (any non-Explorer, like Firefox) set to not open links or new windows without permission or not automatically download things. I guess it's less needed. I guess I'm still troubled by the tracking cookies telling my streaming services about products I am thinking about. 

LibreOffice is free and comparable to MS Office.  MS has more fonts and its Excel version 
has more enhanced capabilities I think.  I haven't figured out how to insert page #'s in Libre's
Writer yet so I switch to an old version of MS Word that I still have.

[telnetd]

12 hours ago, rodheadlee said:

The other problem is if I try to use MS  Word the cursor jumps all over the place it's impossible to type up a document. I suppose it could have a virus I don't know.

Trend Micro provides a free scanner.  It downloads a 5 MB exe file to your computer.  
Double click on it to run it.  For your computer, it may take 45 minutes to an hour.
Any virus on your computer may prevent it from running.

On my faster computer, it ran for 15 minutes.  Nothing is installed so there's no
cleanup afterwards.

https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/forHome/products/housecall.html