Good evening. I hope you’re doing well.
My sister’s fifteen year old laptop she was using for basic school use has finally given up recently, so we were thinking about getting her a replacement. Though with the current laptop prices, especially here in Ukraine, I’ve been increasingly looking at the used laptop market instead.
Do you think the laptops with Intel’s Raptor Lake P or Meteor Lake H series processors are worth looking at in the used market now in 2026? I think we’ve seen both at around 600€ mark a couple of times, so I’ve been considering it as an option now.
It feels like the Lunar Lake laptops seem to start around 1500€ over here, which is a little bit outside of our budget right now, not even talking about Panther Lake, which don’t seem to be available in our region yet at all.
She will probably use her laptop for basic office use (web browsing, Microsoft Office, that sort of thing, though she tends to love to have dozens of tabs open at the same time), so I don’t think we’d need a laptop too powerful, but I don’t want to buy a laptop that would scream the need of replacement in a year or two because the software she’d need in university won’t run on it (though I think she wants to go at finance or something, which shouldn’t be that computationally expensive in that regard, at least as far as I’d imagine)
Our stores have been running promotions on Xiaomi’s RedmiBooks recently, which fell into this price point, but they have either AMD’s Zen 3 processors that I already have a “fun” time with in my HP ProBook right now, or Intel’s Alder Lake, which, from what I read, wouldn’t be much better, so it feels like those will be a terrible value for money for those laptops.
What do you guys think?
Thanks in advance for your help.
-Cosmic