Hi, everybody, I would like to share my experience on the above topic. I recently bought 2 core i3 7th generation secondhand laptops of Ebay Australia and the computer shop decided to put old mechanical hard drives in them when they upgraded them with windows 11 and offered them for sale ( the seller has about 12 of them left ).

I am a retired computer technician and my advice is this:

1. Do not buy a secondhand laptop or desktop computer that has windows 11 and uses a mechanical standard hard drive. Windows 11 is designed to use fast solid state drives and does not work satisfactorily with old mechanical hard drives with spinning platters ( the old legacy hard drives before solid state hard drives came out )...old mechanical hard drives can't cope with the software demands and all the services windows 11 loads at start up and they can take 5 minutes to boot up and the computer runs woefully slow leading to a very poor experience... and frustrating!

2. Some large secondhand computer resellers on Ebay are resorting ( to cut costs ) putting old legacy mechanical hard drives into old machines and putting windows 11 on them leading to a terrible computer thats too slow to use. The reason this is happenning, is because of the world wide shortage of solid state hard drives and ram ( due to A.I ) making secondhand computers too expensive to refubish with solid state drives so they are taking shortcuts putting cheap old mechanical hard drives in them and putting windows 11 on them AND then flogging them off to the unsuspecting public on Ebay leading to a poor buyer experience.

   They are selling essentially what is junk and the only thing its good for is E-waste so the buyer just looses money and feels ripped off

3. Incidences of this happenning are increasing as computer shops try to off load old "computer junk" on Ebay as windows 10 is going to finally die in October 2026 and be no longer supported with any updates, so computer resellers are doing cheap refurbs on old tech, bypassing windows 11 hardware requirements to cheat and then on top of that puting slow mechanical hard drives in them that leads to a piece of slow junk being sold on Ebay and a totally unsatisfactory buyer experience.

4. My advice to all buyers is this:

   (A) Do not buy an old desktop laptop or desktop that is advertised as running windows 11 unless it has a Intel 8th generation or latter processor in it ( from about 2018 onwards ) AND do not buy it unless it has a proper solid state hard drive in it, it must say "256 gb SSD" or more solid state drive in it, don't buy it, if it says "500 Gb hard drive", the key in the add it must say 'solid state drive" or abbreviated as "SSD".

   (B) For windows 11 to run properly it needs at least 8 gb of ram, 4 Gb is not enough to run windows 11 and again with this low ram it will run pathetically slow

5. Windows 11 minimum requirements: at least 256 Gb solid state drive and 8 Gb of ram.

6. Many sellers are selling windows 11 laptops with 128 Gb solid state drives, 128 Gb is too small to serve as windows 11 takes up 40 Gb of the hard drive by itself, you need 10% of the hard drive free or about 30 Gb for windows 11 to use as swap space or it will crash, so really on a 128 Gb drive, you only have 50 Gb to store your software programs and data which is nowhere near enough nowdays e.g if you put MS office on, that program by itself will consume 20 Gb of drive space, leaving you only 30 Gb. A 128 Gb hard drive with windows 11 will fill up so fast, the buyer wont know its overfull until windows 11 crashes and refuses to boot up.

With older laptops and desktop p.c's being sold secondhand or refurbed with Windows 11 it is really "let the buyer be aware" nowdays as sellers try to dump old tech off to unsuspecting buyers before it ends up as landfill.