wrote in message
...
... Been
doing this now for 26 years. Installed and re-installed at minimum
hundreds of systems from DOS 2 and windows 1 on up to current - and
the current UEFI stuff is a royal BITCH.

Is there a Sweet Spot for used machines with a good tradeoff between
performance and grief?

I went with the Dell Latitude D series business laptops which are very
rugged and easy to work on, and parts are relatively cheap, but the
performance of even the final, top-end models is on the low side for
Windows 7.
-jsw