I’m a student and only have a small budget, so I usually think twice (or three or four times) before buying expensive things like electronic devices. Often I’m choosing cheap devices, because they don’t cost much. But often they have some problems, because they are cheap.

If you now try to buy a new laptop for less than 300€, you usually get a really bad device with like 4 GB of RAM and damn slow HDDs, if not only eMMC storage. Because of this bad hardware you usually have to buy a new one after just two years or so and you have to spend money again.

Did you ever consider buying a refurbished one?

I just bought a Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga S1 for 199€ from nbwn.de and I’m now using it for almost a week. I’m in love with it. Sure, it’s not the newest tech, it’s already some years old. But a few years ago, the hardware inside was high-end and also the price was in a section, I would have never considered spending.

It’s a 12.5" convertible - Stylus support hopefully helps me with taking notes, 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD. Even for a SSD alone you would need to pay 100€. The Intel Core i5 4th Gen. isn’t the best, but it’s definitely better than all my other Intel Pentium and Celerons.

Because Windows 8.1 was installed and I really don’t like Windows, I decided to install Solus, but have Windows 10 in a VirtualBox to have it for a programm I need for university, which doesn’t work well on Linux. It’s damn fast with this configuration, I can normally boot it up in just a few seconds.

Regarding the “refurbished”: The notebook looks almost like new. Sure, you see at a few points, that it was used before, but the merchant got it from a demo pool by Lenovo and the devices are most of the time just used to test, if they fit some companies requirements.

This post was written just to express my love to this device and maybe give you a tip, if you’re also on a small budget, but also want a great device worth the money. 😉