Is it worth buying a 2010 MacBook PRO, 15", Intel i7 in 2016?

[doktorS]

I don't have too much money and have found a 2010 Macbook Pro 15'', i7, 500 GB HDD, for around 500 EUR.
Is it worth buying?
What problems could I have (OS,screen, battery etc)?
I would mainly use it for translation work - Trados, Wordfast, heavy word editing - a little internet browsing, some movies, basic photo editing and so on.
Any advice would be welcome!

 

[BadAsAl]

That is still a decent laptop for what you described.
Battery is always a concern. If you have an opportunity to look at the System Report before you buy (or ask seller for screenshot), look under Power and look for the status and cycle count of the battery. If it is anything but normal, you will be replacing it soon. Also cycle count above 1000 is not really a good thing. Replacing the battery is easy to do but could run you another 100 or so if you replace with an original Apple battery.

Other things I do:
- I always turn on the on screen keyboard and hit each key to make sure the keyboard is working correctly
- make sure you can see wireless networks so you know the WiFi is working
- test each USB port to make sure those are functional
- when you plug in the charger, make sure it goes green and then orange so you know it is charging the battery

Hopefully you can do all this before purchase.

 

[SHECS]

I am running a mid 2010 MacBook Pro with an i5 @ 2.53 GHz, 500GB HDD, 8GB DDR3 and it runs like a charm... even with MacOS HighSierra... so back in 2016 it was still very valuable... but even now in 2018 it still competes with the newest! I am considering upgrading RAM again to 16GB DDR3-1066MHz and putting in an 500GB SSD though... for the machine is still going strong with MacOS 10.13.3... I wonder if it'll continue to compete when Apple launches MacOS 10.14 though... since the machine will then be around 9 or 10 years old...

 

[BadAsAl]

I am running a mid 2010 MacBook Pro with an i5 @ 2.53 GHz, 500GB HDD, 8GB DDR3 and it runs like a charm... even with MacOS HighSierra... so back in 2016 it was still very valuable... but even now in 2018 it still competes with the newest! I am considering upgrading RAM again to 16GB DDR3-1066MHz and putting in an 500GB SSD though... for the machine is still going strong with MacOS 10.13.3... I wonder if it'll continue to compete when Apple launches MacOS 10.14 though... since the machine will then be around 9 or 10 years old...

Unless you are running high end applications like video editing you will not likely notice the difference in performance between a modern MacBook and yours once you upgrade to an SSD. If you aren't able to do both and have to choose between RAM or SSD, the SSD will be a much more noticeable increase in performance and I recommend doing that first.