u/Odd-Friendship6078

I have been doing the Pentester path - right now I'm on the shells and Payload section - the final assessment, and I've run into some problems.

During my first try, it worked fine - but I couldn't complete it as I couldn't figure it out. But during my third try with the box, RDP wasn't initially connecting. After restarting the server, the RDP worked but gets on disconnecting.

During my fourth it was better but after 30 mins it started getting disconnected again. Combined with that and the fact that the machine is extremely slow I'm having a really difficult time. I didn't even know the machine had a browser until I checked the forums/walkthroughs because there wasn't anything listed on the menu.

Has anyone run into these same issues? I assume that the issue is because too many people are connecting to the same machine and it's nothing from my side - is my assumption correct, is there any solutions?

Thank you!

Hello ThinkPadians, my laptop which I've been using for 6 years recently died and I'm on the market for another. Since I'm a student barely getting through each months, I've been looking at refurbished laptops, and came across this interesting community and is eying a thinkpad right now. The one I've got my eyes on is a Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 1 with AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 4750U, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD. It's listed for 286 Euros.

Since I'm an IT masters student, I'll be doing a variety of coding including pentests, using multiple IDEs, running Containers, Web Dev, Data Analysis stuff and ML(not so important).

How smart is this decision? The only thing holding me back is that it's a Gen 1, hence is probably as old as my dying Laptop.

I know this is a question that's been asked multiple times, but I would really appreciate any answers. This would be my first refurbished pc, so any advice about tests or checks I should run would also be appreciated.

Thank you!