I recently replaced my old 2001 Toshiba laptop with a used Lenovo. The Toshiba was a Frankenputer I assembled from the working parts of mine, my wife's same-model-as-mine & a parts carcass from eBay. Turns out there was a graphics card/m'board soldering fault across the model series that affected many of them. Both of ours suffered the fault at different times - hences the parts carcass for that and other issues until there were only enough working parts to make a single working machine.
Still, 9 years is pretty good going.
I chose a used Lenovo W500 because there doesn't seem to be any laptops sold new today that have 15.4" matte WUXGA (1920x1200) screens. Damn near everything is glossy and, at most, 1920x1080 resolution ie 16:9 aspect ratio instead of 16:10. My old laptop was 15.0" UXGA (1600x1200) and damned if I wanted to lose a couple of hundred pixels of resolution to suit the HD aspect ratio marketing idiots. I do mostly documents & web browsing, not movie watching so bugger that loss for a joke! Nor do I like glossy screens. I couldn't give a rat's arse about ultra-vivid colours vs 'normal' colours. I care more about seeing what's displayed on the screen and not the lights behind me.
I rather like this W500! Both a trackpad & trackpoint, 3 USB 2.0 slots + another 4 on the mini docking bay, SD/memory card slot, Cardbus *and* Express card slots, Bluetooth 3.0 & -N Wifi, a camera and the usual array of input/output ports including. It has an Intel 2.8GHz Core 2 Duoprocessor which is more than powerful enough for me as well as two graphics engines: a low power draw Intel mobile graphics chip+ a higher performance ATI FireGL graphics card. Choose graphics performance or battery life as needed (I can get 5 hours or more out of it if I need to. Even more if I bought the optional optical drive bay battery pack).
If Lenovo was still making these I'd have bought one new. Unfortunately it's been superseded by the W510 or 520 with a HD resolution screen. If Jayne's desktop replacement 17" behemoth dies while getting another one of these still makes sense then I think she'll end up with a W500 too.