Which used laptop meets these requirements best?

Question

since there's a plethora of laptops available, which used laptop can you recommend that meets (all of the) following requirements?

• price around 600€/700$ (or a little more, I might find one in bad optical condition or stretch my budget a bit if it's really worth it)
• win 7 was preinstalled from factory
• 16:10 screen, resolution may be as low as 1280 x 800, but higher preferred. Non-glossy display preferred, but glossy is fine
• 13" or 15" if light
• battery life at least 6h (with new battery), preferrably a battery that can be replaced by myself
• very good keyboard (Thinkpad or Macbook pro as reference)
• SSD, 128GB is fine
• if ram isn't upgradable, 4GB the very least
• i5 or better
• reasonable trackpad. Doesn't have to be Macbook-good but also shouldn't be Thinkpad T410-terrible. Can be small though
• cooling fan accessible for cleaning

What I don't need: USB 3 (or any other port besides USB 2), Webcam, dedicated gpu.. You get the picture.

Build quality and reliability should be good. Rather business grade than consumer. Please recommend dell laptops only if they are widely known to be very reliable as I have made only bad experiences with dell laptops.

Thank you very much, I appreciate your help.

Answer 1

You kind of answered your own question here, the only things that fit those specs will be a used macbook or a used Lenovo T5XX series or higher from within the past 3-4 years. You'll likely need to source a new battery and the SSD (Lenovo only, for a Mac you're SOL on these most likely), but everything else on the spec list you can find by searching on Craigslist or Ebay and having some patience. Finding used product listings that actually apply to you is going to be impractical at best without location information, and timing is hard in that capacity as well. By the time anyone finds something, posts it here, and you see it, the item may well be sold.

You could also take this list into a few local PC shops, any major metro area these days has at least a few repair spots that also sell used hardware. You'll often find them advertising on used goods websites as well.

The factory-installed Win7 could be a bit of an issue. A lot of used hardware resellers will sell a laptop with a scrubbed hard drive and a fresh installation of Windows. There's also the potential for hidden malware and other issues, so I'd highly recommend getting a laptop with an OEM Windows key (the laptop will have this as long as it shipped with Windows). You'll then want to clean the hard drive yourself, preferably using DiskPart, and install a fresh copy of Windows that you download directly from Microsoft. This will avoid most issues with malware. If you get a laptop from a shop, odds are all this will be done for you but you can definitely ask about it.