Shadowing Practice: What Can a $50 Laptop Do?!? (2026) - Learn English Speaking with Video

Hi everyone, my name's Matt and this is a ThinkPad T470S that I purchased for right around $50 on eBay.

In today's video I'm going to show you what it took to get it fully up and running, what it's capable of and do my best to clean up and refurbish this old used laptop.

So recently I decided I wanted a cheap machine for trying out different Linux distros

and for some basic work like writing scripts.

I pretty much knew right off the bat I wanted to

go for a ThinkPad of some kind as they're generally easy to upgrade

and repair and I've owned an X220 in the past and really liked

The holy grail of Thinkpads at least from what I've read online are the T480s, but those guys usually start close to $200 for a working unit with RAM and storage.

That was a little more than what I wanted to spend

and after looking at a bunch of different models and deal hunting, I ended up pulling the trigger on this listing here,

which you can see I paid about $30 for the laptop itself and $18 for shipping.

The pictures weren't the best but it seemed to be in decent physical shape, and even though it was listed for parts, the description said it did charge and worked enough to look through the BIOS,

which meant it was almost certainly fully functional.

With an i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD, it seemed like it was specced out fine for the type of things I was looking to do with it,

so I hit buy it now and patiently waited for it to arrive.

After about a week, I received the ThinkPad in the mail

and was surprised to find the seller shipped it in a soft plastic envelope, though when I opened it up I found there was complete bubble wrap coverage

and the laptop itself once out didn't look to be damaged from shipping, so no harm no foul, and all that came in the package was the laptop itself.

No charger, but I've got a compatible one on hand and you can get OEM ones from eBay for like $5.

On first inspection there were a few light scratches and minor wear, but overall nothing looked noticeably broken, and considering this laptop released around 9 years ago,

this guy seemed to be in pretty good shape.

Opening the lid I found again some lightly worn surfaces, but nothing major in terms of damage, Pressing the power button, the keyboard illuminated and then loaded this boot menu.

There didn't seem to be an OS already on it, so I ended up getting into this diagnostic screen where I could see the system info.

Going to the CPU tab, I confirmed this laptop is using an Intel Core i5 -6300U.

This is a 2 -core 4 -thread CPU that's not very powerful

but should be good enough for a basic Linux productivity machine.

Under the Memory tab, I saw it did indeed have 8GB of DER4 memory, but I couldn't seem to find any information on the pre -installed storage, which is a bit of foreshadowing.

Under the display tab I found the model number

and looking it up it seems this is in fact an IPS display like the listing stated.

It's a 14" 1080p 16 :9 display and we'll talk about my thoughts on it more in a bit.

Port wise this laptop's pretty well kitted out with a power input.

USB 3, Combo Audio, and SD card reader on the left.

On the other side we find a Smart Card Reader, a Thunderbolt 3 USB -C port, two more USB 3 ports,

HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet, a SIM card slot, and a Kensington lock.

So, I shouldn't be needing any dongles for this laptop.

With the device turned off, I decided to take a look at the internals.

Five screws and some plastic clips hold on the bottom cover.

Also, these are captive screws, meaning they stay attached to the panel, which is a small thing, but is so nice because it means you're way less likely to lose one of these tiny screws.

Inside, I found a couple of interesting things, the first being there's no SSD installed, even though the listing said there should be a 256GB drive,

and that the M .2 Wi -Fi card isn't screwed down.

But before I messed with anything I decided to unplug the batteries

which required me to remove a couple of screws for each and pop them out.

And this shows you how easy it is to remove the batteries

and how easy it would be to replace a battery if I needed to.

Now visually there isn't any swelling or anything on these guys

but who knows how much of a charge they'll hold and how many cycles they've been put through.

Bringing my attention to the RAM and pulling out the single stick, I found it's only a 4GB module, meaning there must be 4 additional gigs soldered to the board somewhere,

but even just upgrading this to an 8GB stick for 12GB total in the future could be nice.

Right above the DIMM slot is the cooler for the CPU, which looks clean and dust free, and the only other thing worth noting is under here there's

a few more antenna cables running to an empty M .2 slot of some sort, I'm assuming it's similar to the M .2 WiFi slot,

but probably for cellular and I quickly stole the screw from this one to hold down the wifi card.

Before putting the batteries back in, I installed a 256GB Intel 600P NVMe SSD that I had recently purchased on eBay for around $17,

also I used a screw that I had on hand.

Which if you add a buck for the screw, $17 for the SSD, and $5 for the charger to the original purchase price of the laptop,

that brings the total price to really get this up and running to a little over $70, which if that's all I have to spend for a fully functional laptop, then that's not bad in my opinion.

I might replace the thermal paste later, but for now, I just wanted to start testing it out a bit.

Also, if you're wondering, even though the listing did have a 256GB SSD listed in the specs,

something I missed was it pretty clearly stated in the conditions section that it didn't come with a hard drive or charger, which I don't know how I missed that, but again, it's not the end of the world.

So, what's this guy capable of?

Well, to test the base performance, ironically I decided to do it inside of Windows before installing Linux to see stuff like temps, general performance, and even gaming performance.

Part of why a laptop like this is so cheap is

that it's not natively able to run Windows 11 which many people require now that Windows 10 has reached end of life.

Now you can use Rufus to make a bootable Windows 11 USB that'll bypass the TPM 2 .0 requirement,

but the way the great time inside of Windows 11, so I just installed Windows 10 for testing.

Booting in and getting stuff installed and set up was a pretty slow experience, but general use in Windows 10 wasn't too bad, gaming is another story.

I know this isn't a gaming laptop, but for the heck of it, I decided to test out a few games.

In Valorant, at 720p low, I saw around 30 -40 FPS average, but with a ton of stutters and lag.

This was basically unplayable, and I just had zero chance of having any success with this kind of performance.

In Fortnite with the lowest settings in performance mode, I again saw around a 30 fps average with 1 % lows of around 2.

This again stuttered a ton and froze completely at points, but surprisingly I was able to get a few kills which was kinda funny.

Finally, even Minecraft at 720p with the lowest graphical preset called fast didn't provide a very good experience.

Even though the fps was a little higher than the other titles, it still stuttered a ton, to run.

You could technically hook up a Thunderbolt 3 eGPU to the USB -C port

which would give you a big performance uplift

but this would cost like $200 for a dock and graphics card so definitely not worth it in my opinion.

If you're wanting to game on a PC like this, I think emulation is the way to go.

I flashed a 128GB Baudicera image to an SD card

and thought it would be cool to have this plugged in at all times

and be able to boot to it whenever I wanted.

But I found out you can't boot to an SD card on this laptop.

I could still boot to it with an SD to USB adapter

and I was able to run and play a bunch of different retro titles.

So again, if you're wanting to game on an older system like this, retro console emulation is the way to go in my opinion.

hundreds if not thousands of titles that will be playable on this PC.

Temperature wise, this PC idled around 42 degrees, and under load sat around the high 60s to mid 70s,

which is decent, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to change out the thermal paste.

I also ran a battery test report in Windows, which once completed showed the batteries have definitely been heavily used, as one had a cycle count of nearly 800,

and the other had a cycle count of nearly 1000.

With that being said, they still had a usable capacity of around 75%, which should translate to at least a couple hours of general use, which is fine with me,

and like I said before, changing these batteries out is super simple to do, so in the future, if I'm not getting the battery life I want, I can always swap out the existing batteries for new ones.

And before I installed a Linux distro, I did decide to open the system back up, take out the batteries again, and change out the thermal paste, which was a pretty quick and pain -free process.

With that done, I was ready to install Linux, I decided to start with Linux Mint Cinnamon, All I did was grab the ISO from the Linux Mint website.

flashed it to a USB, booted to that USB and selected to install Linux Mint to my SSD.

And after about 15 minutes, I had Linux installed, which definitely was noticeably faster and more responsive than Windows 10 on this machine.

For editing Word documents and spreadsheet files, browsing the web, and streaming 1080p video, this PC seemed to handle it all fine.

I even downloaded Minecraft, and running it at the same settings as I did in Windows, yielded a much smoother experience, likely due to having way less background processes going on.

Again, I don't think I'll ever use this laptop for gaming, but it's nice to see better gaming performance in Linux than in Windows.

plastic surfaces, the screen, the keyboard, and anything else that looked like it needed to be cleaned off.

I've been using this laptop for a few days now, just to make sure everything's working as intended, and luckily it is.

100

I'm able to get a few hours of work done before needing to plug it in, which is fine because I don't plan on using it much outside of the house.

101

I've been using it a lot in the mornings to do stuff like answer emails, manage to -do lists in Notion, along with planning and scripting videos,

102

which has been nice to do away from my desk that I spend most of my working days at.

103

This green isn't great but it gets reasonably bright and is perfectly usable.

104

Viewing angles aren't amazing but I'm only ever using it looking straight on so that's not a problem to me.

105

The trackpad is a basic plastic one that works fine

106

and I may look into upgrading this to a glass one

107

which is a mod I think others have done though I'll use an external mouse whenever possible.

108

The keyboard was a little bit of a disappointment, as while it's far from the worst laptop keyboard I've ever used, it pales in comparison to the one I had on my X220.

109

I know these are easily replaceable and you can get an aftermarket one for like $15 - $20, so I may do research into if it's worth it or not to switch it out,

110

and what the best one of those replacement ones is in terms of quality and typing experience.

111

But overall the laptop is completely usable and I don't have any major complaints.

112

Also, this 14" form factor is a nice size in my opinion as the screen's big enough to use comfortably

113

while also being small enough to easily fit in a laptop bag.

114

And to finish this off, I decided to do two more things to polish it up.

115

The first is I removed all the old broken feet from the bottom panel

116

and installed these inexpensive adhesive ones that I got for only like a buck on AliExpress.

117

factory new surface condition.

118

But I'll let you be the judge, here's the laptop before any cleaning, and here it is after cleaning and doing the magic eraser method.

119

Now I've also seen people say they put Nivea hand cream on the top after doing the magic eraser thing, and I'm not sure if this is just an elaborate troll or not,

120

but I didn't think it would be worth it spending the money on the hand cream to try it out, and I really only did the magic eraser trick because I had some on hand.

121

ThinkPad now is fully up and running.

122

This isn't a powerhouse or anything, but it's great for basic tasks, and while I wouldn't want this to break or be stolen, I'm much less worried about handling it super carefully

123

or traveling with it as losing out on

124

or breaking a $75 laptop is much easier to get over compared to doing the same to a $500 laptop

125

let alone one that's $1000 + So yeah guys, I think it's time to wrap this video up.

126

I hope you guys enjoyed it, if you did consider subscribing, and as always this is Matt from Tech by Matt, signing out.

✨ Recommend Video

368 sentences

Why This Video Is Great for English Speaking Practice

This video is a goldmine for IELTS speaking practice and general English fluency. The host, Matt, uses clear, conversational language—perfect for mimicking natural speech patterns. His tone is relaxed but informative, making it easy to follow along, while details like "bubble wrap coverage" and "captive screws" introduce practical vocabulary. Whether you’re practicing shadowspeaks or refining pronunciation, the dialogue balances everyday phrases with technical terms, helping you build versatility.

Breaking Down Natural Speech Patterns

Let’s look at a few lines that sound authentic. First: "I pretty much knew right off the bat I wanted to go for a ThinkPad." The phrase "right off the bat" is a common idiom, and the casual structure ("I pretty much knew") mirrors how native speakers talk—no rigid grammar. Next: "No charger, but I've got a compatible one on hand." The contrast "but" and phrasal verb "on hand" flow naturally, showing how to connect ideas quickly. Finally: "Who knows how much of a charge they'll hold?" The rhetorical question and contraction ("they'll") add conversational flair, a key skill for english speaking practice.

A Simple Shadow Speech Routine

To practice, try this repeat-and-record loop. First, watch 10 seconds of the video, pausing after each sentence. Then, shadow speech—repeat the line immediately, mimicking Matt’s intonation and pace. Record yourself, then compare. Notice how he stresses words like "surprised" or "decent" to emphasize points. Do this daily for 15 minutes, focusing on phrases with idioms or technical terms. Over time, you’ll improve English pronunciation and feel more confident in casual conversations—skills that shine in IELTS speaking practice. Remember: the goal is to sound natural, not perfect, so embrace the rhythm of his speech.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on	I've been using
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	I've owned · I've read · they've been put
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	was listed · was specced · be damaged
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	storage, which is · panel, which is · kills which was

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: What Can a $50 Laptop Do?!? (2026) - Learn English Speaking with Video

I spent $12,000 on the THINNEST Tech

I Drove 10,000 Miles Around America Alone | Part 1

I'm Learning to Appreciate My Phone

Dreame L60 Pro Ultra Review — Almost Everything Right!

startup diaries ep. 9 - taking on quizlet and duolingo

Matt vs Japan's Ideal Shadowing Setup - How to Shadow

Finally a Mini Cooper?! vs Coolant Spill🥲 // Nürburgring

Fujifilm Should Be VERY Worried

9 Investments for Better Learning

Nvidia's New Laptops - RTX Spark

How to Build a PC Step by Step 2026 (Pick the RIGHT Parts First)

The Wall Outlet Computer

Why This Video Is Great for English Speaking Practice

Breaking Down Natural Speech Patterns

A Simple Shadow Speech Routine

Grammar in this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?