Hello everyone, I have never owned a laptop before( PC user from the very start), I want a laptop for my IT career(coding stuff) but I have a really low budget and wanna buy just a second hand laptop that can run some lightweight Linux distro. The thing is that laptop prices are really high here in India, you can get a second hand laptop that has an i5 and 4gb ram for about rs.17000 (204 dollars), my aunt is in Canada and they are coming back to India next year so i can just ask them to bring me a laptop I went to ebay.com and found some really cheap options like “HP ELITE BOOK 840 G1” for just 30 dollars, now the question is that is it okay to buy a 30-60 dollar laptop from eBay and will they allow it while passing through the airport ???
Passing through the airport should be no problem at all. As somebody who’s done a similar thing before, I can tell you that your aunt probably won’t run into problems. My bigger question is about the laptop you are looking at that is $30. It’s rare that laptops go for so cheap here, even used ones. I would advise you to investigate the seller to make sure they are trustworthy to avoid being scammed or sold a broken computer.
The 840 G1 is extremely old, featuring a 4th Gen Haswell CPU and integrated graphics. It also likely had a mechanical hard drive and 4gb RAM. These were common enterprise machines, but they have all been phased out - possibly several times over.
$30-60 is on the low end, but not excessively so. In 2018 I picked up a comparable Lenovo Thinkpad 3rd Gen for about $100. 5 years later and 1 generation newer, $60 is reasonable.
Will this meet OP’s needs? Tough to say. SSD and a RAM upgrade are worthy investments, which will drive up the price, but it can handle lighter tasks.
Just be careful that many of these have the hard drive removed (data security), and many of them also remove the hard drive caddy (because that’s faster). You would need a replacement caddy and drive