Discussion The risk of buying an old refurbished Chromebook

[hw_user]

I am very bad at keeping my stuff safe while traveling. I traveled 2 to 3 times every year. I lost my bag with my laptop in it 3 times in the last 5 years. I do not want to bring my regular laptop with me anymore in my next travel. I am thinking of getting a cheap refurbished Chromebook. I mostly only watch movies from USB key or YouTube, check emails, and browse the web while traveling. Only in a very urgent situation ( 2 times in the last 5 years) I had to log into my bank accounts. Some cheap refurbished Chromebooks can go as low as under $100 and they should be able to do the job. However, these cheaper ones are too old to get any more updates. I assume that they will still run. Unsupported Chromebooks are not getting system updates. I can run Android apps on the Chromebook. If I run Firefox browser app and anti-virus app, will updates of apps running on it cover some of the loopholes left by missing system patches?

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Why not find something like this?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/2567540283...1QoO_yZSxW&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY

Waiting on it to arrive but just bought this on eBay for 100 bucks. Comes with 8 gb of ram and a 128 gb ssd drive but I ordered a 16gb ram kit for just over 20 bucks. You can get a 500gb ssd drive for about 30 bucks for it. It’s got a 4 core 8 thread 8th generation i5 so should run windows 11. I looked and even a replacement battery only appears to be about 20 bucks if needed. For 100 bucks that’s not bad. Waiting to see what shape mine is in.

With all the winter weather here in the USA I had to work from home a couple of days and did not want to put a bunch of work stuff on my gaming rig. I’m an IT guy. But saw this for 100 so at that price if it keeps me from having to use my gaming rig or my wife’s little i3 laptop for working from home it seems like a winner. Plus it’s a Dell business class so as long as it’s functioning and not too beat up it should last a while. We use almost all Dell business class systems at work and usually only pull them when they get obsolete not because they quit working. But if you look up that model on YouTube it looks very easy to work on.