What would be a decent laptop for my use?

Refurbished is not really a good idea on laptop trust me. You might want something around the Toshiba line of laptops. They have a laptops that have ATI Radeon HD Graphics cards compared to those laptops with Intel Processors always comes with Intel HD Graphics which is a terrible integrated graphics! ATI graphics card most of the time come with any laptop that has an AMD processor like Athlon and Phenom. Remember Intel i3 and i5 has a low chance of having good graphics card. The Intel i7 has a high chance to have a good GPU but expensive