Lenovo T420 - When to Buy?

Hi,

I'm hoping that this isn't in the wrong place, but I was looking for some expertise on the timing of Lenovo's sales in the past.

My question is: while there aren't any discounts currently on the laptop I want (T420), should I wait for more pre or post-Christmas salels? Were there good deals pre or post-Christmas last year on Thinkpads? If past years didn't yield any more sales immediately pre-Christmas or post-Christmas, I might just buy a refurbed laptop.

The source of my frustration is that I decided to buy a Thinkpad T420 laptop with a SSD drive, and after speccing out my laptop on Dec 6th with the 15% discount, when I went to buy the next day, the 15% sale had ended. There was another sale for 10% the day after, but that one ended after a day. I'm really frustrated and don't want to overpay if I can avoid it, but don't want to wait forever for a better deal.

 

Lenovo releases a lot of ecoupon discounts, so it's hard to say when prices will be at their lowest. The holiday season usually does bring in some nice 20% coupons, so if you can wait a bit, keep your eyes open.

If you do find a pretty good discount but are not sure whether you want to purchase at that moment, you can save a quote. It's been a long time since I've done so, but I believe you have to enter in some of your information, and at one of the screens before you place your order, you can click a button that says something like "Convert to Quote." Quotes are good for 28 days, and if you call Lenovo Sales with a saved quote, they can configure the same machine for the price you saved.

The only catch is, if the parts that your quote specify are no longer available (ie: a slightly older CPU option), then they may or may not be able to honor the price.

 

That is really helpful, thanks! I wish I had known that before.