What Can a $50 Laptop Do?!? (2026)

Hi everyone, my name is Matt and this is a ThinkPad T470S that I purchased for right around $50 on eBay. In today's video, I'm going to show you what it took to get it fully up and running, what it's capable of, and do my best to clean up and refurbish this old used laptop. So, recently, I decided I wanted a cheap machine for trying out different Linux distros and for some basic work like writing scripts. I pretty much knew right off the bat I wanted to go for a ThinkPad of some kind, as they're generally easy to upgrade and repair. And I've owned an X220 in the past and really liked it. The holy grail of ThinkPads, at least from what I've read online, are the T480s, but those guys usually start close to $200 for a working unit with RAM and storage. That was a little more than what I wanted to spend. And after looking at a bunch of different models and deal hunting, I ended up pulling the trigger on this listing here, which you can see I paid about $30 for the laptop itself and $18 for shipping. The pictures weren't the best, but it seemed to be in decent physical shape. And even though it was listed for parts, the description said it did charge and worked enough to look through the BIOS, which meant it was almost certainly fully functional. With an i5 CPU, 8 gigs of RAM, and a 256 GB SSD, it seemed like it was speced out fine for the type of things I was looking to do with it. So, I hit buy it now and patiently waited for it to arrive. After about a week, I received the ThinkPad in the mail and was surprised to find the seller shipped it in a soft plastic envelope. Though, when I opened it up, I found there was complete bubble wrap coverage. And the laptop itself once out didn't look to be damaged from shipping. So, no harm, no foul. And all that came in the package was the laptop itself, no charger, but I've got a compatible one on hand, and you can get OEM ones from eBay for like five bucks. On first inspection, there were a few light scratches and minor wear, but overall, nothing looked noticeably broken. And considering this laptop released around 9 years ago, this guy seemed to be in pretty good shape. Opening the lid, I found again some lightly worn surfaces, but nothing major in terms of damage. Pressing the power button, the keyboard illuminated and then loaded this boot menu. There didn't seem to be an OS already on it. So, I ended up getting into this diagnostic screen where I could see the system info. Going to the CPU tab, I confirmed this laptop is using an Intel Core i5 6300U. This is a two core 4thread CPU that's not very powerful, but should be good enough for a basic Linux productivity machine. Under the memory tab, I saw it did indeed have 8 GB of DDR4 memory, but I couldn't seem to find any information on the pre-installed storage, which is a bit of foreshadowing. Under the display tab, I found the model number, and looking it up, it seems this is in fact an IPS display, like the listing stated, it's a 14-in 1080p 16x9 display. And we'll talk about my thoughts on it more in a bit. Port-wise, this laptop's pretty well kitted out with a power input, USB 3, combo audio, an SD card reader on the left. On the other side, we find a smart card reader, a Thunderbolt 3 USBC port, two more USB 3 ports, HDMI, gigabit Ethernet, a SIM card slot, and a Kensington lock. So, I shouldn't be needing any dongles for this laptop. With the device turned off, I decided to take a look at the internals. Five screws and some plastic clips hold on the bottom cover. Also, these are captive screws, meaning they stay attached to the panel, which is a small thing, but is so nice because it means you're way less likely to lose one of these tiny screws. Inside, I found a couple of interesting things. The first being there's no SSD installed, even though the listing said there should be a 256 GB drive and that the M.2 Wi-Fi card isn't screwed down. But before I messed with anything, I decided to unplug the batteries, which required me to remove a couple of screws for each and pop them out. And this shows you how easy it is to remove the batteries and how easy it would be to replace a battery if I needed to. Now, visually, there isn't any swelling or anything on these guys, but who knows how much of a charge they'll hold and how many cycles they've been put through. Bring my attention to the RAM and pulling out the single stick, I found it's only a 4 GB module, meaning there must be four additional gigs soldered to the board somewhere. But even just upgrading this to an 8 GB stick for 12 gigs total in the future could be nice. Right above the dim slot is the cooler for the CPU, which looks clean and dustfree. And the only other thing worth noting is under here, there's a few more antenna cables running to an empty M.2 slot of some sort. I'm assuming it's similar to the M.2 Wi-Fi slot, but probably for cellular. And I quickly stole the screw from this one to hold down the Wi-Fi card. Before putting the batteries back in, I installed a 256 GB Intel 600P NVME SSD that I had recently purchased on eBay for around $17. Also, I used a screw that I had on hand, which if you add a buck for the screw, $17 for the SSD, and $5 for the charger to the original purchase price of the laptop. That brings the total price to really get this up and running to a little over $70, which if that's all I have to spend for a fully functional laptop, then that's not bad in my opinion. I might replace the thermal paste later, but for now, I just wanted to start testing it out a bit. Also, if you're wondering, even though the listing did have a 256 GB SSD listed in the specs, something I missed was it pretty clearly stated in the condition section that it didn't come with a hard drive or charger, which I don't know how I missed that, but again, it's not the end of the world. So, what's this guy capable of? Well, to test the base performance, ironically, I decided to do it inside of Windows before installing Linux to see stuff like temps, general performance, and even gaming performance. Part of why a laptop like this is so cheap is that it's not natively able to run Windows 11, which many people require now that Windows 10 has reached end of life. Now, you can use Rufus to make a bootable Windows 11 USB that will bypass the TPM 2.0 0 requirement, but the way the system speced out, I don't think you'd have a great time inside of Windows 11. So, I just installed Windows 10 for testing. Booting in and getting stuff installed and set up was a pretty slow experience, but general use in Windows 10 wasn't too bad. Gaming is another story. I know this isn't a gaming laptop, but for the heck of it, I decided to test out a few games. In Valerin at 720p low, I saw around 30 to 40 FPS average, but with a ton of stutters and lag. This was basically unplayable and I just had zero chance of having any success with this kind of performance. In Fortnite with the lowest settings in performance mode, I again saw around a 30 FPS average with 1% lows of around two. This again stuttered a ton and froze completely at points, but surprisingly I was able to get a few kills, which was kind of funny. Finally, even Minecraft at 720p with the lowest graphical preset called fast didn't provide a very good experience. Even though the FPS was a little higher than the other titles, it still stuttered a ton, which I definitely expected bad performance, but was surprised even Minecraft struggled to run. You could technically hook up a Thunderbolt 3 eGPU to the USBC port, which would give you a big performance uplift, but this would cost like $200 for a dock and graphics card, so definitely not worth it in my opinion. If you're wanting to game on a PC like this, I think emulation is the way to go. I flashed a 128 GB Bodisera image to an SD card and thought it would be cool to have this plugged in at all times and be able to boot to it whenever I wanted, but I found out you can't boot to an SD card on this laptop. I could still boot to it with an SD to USB adapter and I was able to run and play a bunch of different retro titles. So again, if you're wanting to game on an older system like this, retro console emulation is the way to go in my opinion, as there are hundreds, if not thousands of titles that will be playable on this PC. Temperature- wise, this PC idled around 42° and under load sat around the high60s to mid70s, which is decent, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to change out the thermal paste. I also ran a battery test report in Windows which once completed showed the batteries have definitely been heavily used as one had a cycle count of nearly 800 and the other had a cycle count of nearly a thousand. With that being said, they still had a usable capacity of around 75% which should translate to at least a couple hours of general use, which is fine with me. And like I said before, changing these batteries out is super simple to do. So, in the future, if I'm not getting the battery life I want, I can always swap out the existing batteries for new ones. And before I installed a Linux DRO, I did decide to open the system back up, take out the batteries again, and change out the thermal paste, which was a pretty quick and painfree process. With that done, I was ready to install Linux. I decided to start with Linux Mint Cinnamon. Installing this was easy. All I did was grab the ISO from the Linux Mint website, flashed it to a USB, booted to that USB, and selected to install Linux Mint to my SSD, and after about 15 minutes, I had Linux installed, which definitely was noticeably faster and more responsive than Windows 10 on this machine. For editing Word documents and spreadsheet files, browsing the web, and streaming 1080p video, this PC seemed to handle it all fine. I even downloaded Minecraft and running it at the same settings as I did in Windows yielded a much smoother experience, likely due to having way less background processes going on. Again, I don't think I'll ever use this laptop for gaming, but it's nice to see better gaming performance in Linux than in Windows. Also, before daily driving this laptop, I decided to give it a quick initial clean, which included all the plastic surfaces, the screen, the keyboard, and anything else that looked like it needed to be cleaned off. I've been using this laptop for a few days now just to make sure everything's working as intended. And luckily it is. I'm able to get a few hours of work done before needing to plug it in, which is fine because I don't plan on using it much outside of the house. I've been using it a lot in the mornings to do stuff like answer emails, manage to-do list and notion along with planning and scripting videos, which has been nice to do away from my desk that I spend most of my working days at. The screen isn't great, but it gets reasonably bright and is perfectly usable. Viewing angles aren't amazing, but I'm only ever using it looking straight on, so that's not a problem to me. The trackpad is a basic plastic one that works fine, and I may look into upgrading this to a glass one, which is a mod I think others have done. Though, I'll use an external mouse whenever possible. The keyboard was a little bit of a disappointment. As while it's far from the worst laptop keyboard I've ever used, it pales in comparison to the one I had on my X220. I know these are easily replaceable and you can get an aftermarket one for like $15 to $20. So, I may do research into if it's worth it or not to switch it out and what the best one of those replacement ones is in terms of quality and typing experience. But overall, the laptop is completely usable and I don't have any major complaints. Also, this 14-in form factor is a nice size in my opinion as the screen's big enough to use comfortably while also being small enough to easily fit in a laptop bag. And to finish this off, I decided to do two more things to polish it up. The first is I removed all the old broken feet from the bottom panel and installed these inexpensive adhesive ones that I got for only like a buck on AliExpress. I also did the magic eraser method for the top panel where you basically are chemically removing the top layer of the cover, which is supposed to bring a close to factory new surface condition. But I'll let you be the judge. Here's the laptop before any cleaning. And here it is after cleaning and doing the magic eraser method. Now, I've also seen people say they put Nivea hand cream on the top after doing the magic eraser thing. And I'm not sure if this is just an elaborate troll or not, but I didn't think it would be worth it spending the money on the hand cream to try it out. And I really only did the magic eraser trick because I had some on hand. And with that, my $50 ThinkPad, which is really more like a $75 ThinkPad now, is fully up and running. This isn't a powerhouse or anything, but it's great for basic tasks. And while I wouldn't want this to break or be stolen, I'm much less worried about handling it super carefully or traveling with it, as losing out on or breaking a $75 laptop is much easier to get over compared to doing the same to a $500 laptop, let alone one that's $1,000 plus. So, yeah, guys, I think it's time to wrap this video up. I hope you guys enjoyed it. If you did, consider subscribing. And as always, this is Matt from Tech byMatt signing out.

Welcome to my latest video featuring a ThinkPad I recently purchased for only $50! Items Mentioned(affiliate links): T470s: Amazon: https://amzn.to/4s4eT4K eBay: https://bit.ly/40uKG2Z T480: Amazon: https://amzn.to/3ZS0exH eBay: https://bit.ly/4cOPpUB ThinkPads: Amazon: https://amzn.to/4s8ysc9 eBay: https://bit.ly/3OxmI4E NVME SSD: Amazon: https://amzn.to/471OD2T eBay: https://bit.ly/4s2L18M Personal Rig Specs: CPU: https://amzn.to/40zlZ5n Cooler: https://amzn.to/4jouUyW Mobo: https://amzn.to/3Eadx4V RamX2: https://amzn.to/4hpekOh SSD: https://amzn.to/3CrOmKx PSU: https://amzn.to/3ClTDU0 GPU: https://amzn.to/4h9ha9T Case: https://amzn.to/42oPqti DISCLAIMER: All Amazon links are connected to my Amazon Associate account. I earn a small commision from each purchase without any increase in cost to you. All bitly links that go to Newegg are attached to my Newegg affiliate account. All links going to ebay are connected to my Ebay Partner Program account and I earn a commission from purchases made through those links.