There are too many things happening at one time to determine how the size of the display affects the selling and reselling prices. For example, there are far more 15" displays produced and sold than 17" displays, which would make the 17" display more expensive. Double resolution displays (3840x2160) displays are common in 14", but not available in 17" which might make the 14" displays more expensive. What I would guess(tm) is that 17" displays are less desirable because large laptops are less portable, which would lower the price of used
17" laptops. That might be why the price is unusually low.I had something like that happen with Chromebooks. Used and refurbished 13" Chromebooks sell for more than 14". 15" is about the same as 14". Oddly, refurbished 1366x768 sells for about the same as
1920x1080 in the same size screen. Mostly, I'm using prices from Acer recertified:$50 is the approximate cost of a Win 10 license to an MS Authorized Refurbisher. You can find licenses at this price on the gray market. List price is $150, although you can sometimes find it for less.
In this case, Win 7 Pro is what originally came with the laptop so it's an obvious and low cost choice. See the Dell data sheet. The seller does not seem to be an authorized refurbisher and probably does not have access to the $50 Win 10 package.
Warning. It usually takes me a full working day to update Win 7 SP1 to the latest updates. I think there was something like 3GBytes of downloads involved.
RAM is cheap so why not load up the machine? I service a few Dell Optiplex 390(?) machines with Win 7. These are limited (by Dell) to
8GB of RAM maximum by Dell. The 8GB is ok for running 1 or 2 programs at the same time, but gets bogged down when running more.Perhaps a dedicated data logger? Pull the SD card and process that data later on a PC. However, if you're going to do FPGA programming on it, I guess a real PC is justified. I have a few Dell Optiplex 780 in USFF (ultra small form factor) packages running Win 7 with weather station software. I've been swapping out older XP machines after a software upgrade made XP unusable. They're quite small and VERY cheap at $50 to $80. Not sure about reliable quite yet. I've had 2 fan failures.
I'm making the assumption that you will be traveling with a laptop. Since you're considering two of them, I guess this assumption applies to only one.
Downsides:
- Difficult to carry around.
- Eats desk space.
- Hard to find replacement parts.
- Sucks more backlighting power.
- Some 17" machines have larger or odd batteries.
- Larger than the tiny round tables at Starbucks.
Do some searching for questions like "should I buy a 17 inch laptop" or "is a 17 inch laptop too big" and see what others think.
Since you like big screens on laptop, perhaps you should consider an all-in-one PC, such as these: Basically, they're a laptop built into a desktop display. 24" and larger is typical. They're a bit more awkward and heavier, but if you can tolerate the size and weight of the M6600, something in the same class should be even better. Just remove the stand, add a handle, and you're ready to go. Think BIG!
We must live on different planets. Most of my dedicated machines use former cash register monitors, which vary from 11" to 15". I get them cheap. The former owners of 17" laptops mostly went to 14" or 15" displays, and plug into larger monitors when used on a desk. The current fashion is 21.5" to 27".
Here's where we differ in opinion. You consider 17" portable, while I do not. My laptop of choice is a 14" Chromebook. It's small, light, great display, very long battery life, and of course cheap. When I go to a customer, I either use the 14" display, or commandeer their desktop monitor if I have to deal with a small crowd.
See the guys in Florida on how to destroy a bridge. Fire is kinda messy.