I took advice from posters here and bought a refurbished Lenovo 400T Thinkpad laptop.

I got it from TigerDirect.com, it was corporate off-lease, they had provided them to their work force and then upgraded and taken them all back and sold them to the refurbisher.

It had the operating system I wanted, Windows 7 Professional 64 bit, and 4 GB of RAM.

the operating system is a reason to buy refurbished! Because new computers come with Windows 8 now, which I have heard you don't want.

I did buy a warranty for this thing, I have never done that before.

Anyway it's perfect, I love it. Kind of heavy but otherwise great.

I also chose this particular one because it didn't have a web cam.

Computer was 300.00 and 2 year warranty was 100.00. maybe I shouldn't have bought the warranty, or only got one year, but I did. I think it came with a 3 or 6 month warranty.

Now after this I bought a Lenovo desk top, same deal corporate off lease, same operating system, but that one came provided with a one year warranty. It was only 180.00, love it.

I did a lot of research. Newegg has a section for what to look for in laptop specs, what is most important and why, I took notes, I compared different ones.

They come and go so if you don't see what you want keep checking back. Also if you do see what you want you should jump on it.