I’ve spent the last few years using what was my dear better half’s ex-laptop, a truly ancient Lenovo B-500 that I’d bought back in the mists of time and had become unusable in Windows. Ubuntu gave it a bit more life, but eventually, it just got too old.

I’m mean when it comes to PCs, so I turned to the ex-corporate refurb world, and picked up a refurb Thinkpad T-430, with Windows 10, an SSD, core i5, and 16GB of RAM for a good margin below £300. A bit of fiddling with BIOS (re-enabling UEFI boot, mostly) and it’s running Ubuntu 19.10 with no driver headaches. I’m keeping Windows for the odd application (VCDS, for one), but Ubuntu will remain my OS of choice.

The machine itself looks like new, and performs well too, and as it’s business-grade, should take the knocks.