Laptop - refurbished or new?

[PrincessWellington]

Hi,

I want to buy a laptop. It needs to have a DVD drive and not be terribly slow - so at least dual processor.
Not so worried about hard drive capacity

Will mainly be used to run a busy eBay business - perhaps some Word documents too - and to load photos from digital camera.
We have tablets for everything else, but are not keen on using a tablet for the business.

Would like to spend as little as possible but it has to be fit for purpose. £350 max

Any recommendations? Any reasons for or against refurbished laptops? I'm very grateful for any help, I would like to surprise my DH

Also based on opinions of windows 8 I would be happy with windows 7

In the other laptop threads I have recommended an HP250 G1. If you get the model with 6GB RAM and £750 disk it comes with Windows 7 preinstalled and installation disks for Windows 8.

Sticker price is around £440 at ebuyer or laptopsdirect, so it's over budget, but £100 cashback brings it back within budget, provided you can stand the £100 cashback taking a minimum of 2 months to come back.

Note that the wifi was flaky on mine when it was delivered. A driver update seems to have solved the problems I was having.

Thank you cruel. I had read your other thread. Was worried about the cash back element to be honest. I'm a suspicious soul!

I'm less than keen on the cashback bit, but this is my third cashback purchase and the first two worked OK. I would only do it with a major "trustworthy" brand like HP or Toshiba.

If your cash position is tight you have to be aware that the time scale of applying is 30 to 60 days after the purchase (to give you time to forget?) and, I seem to recall, 4 to 6 weeks after that to get paid, so it's at least 8 weeks to get the cash back and could be as much as 14 weeks.