Help i am a Rookie

[cortopar]

There are a lot more working 41s than Woodstock. If you just want a calculator, any 41C, CV, or CX will be fine. Full nut/half nut is generally irrelevant if you don’t disassemble them. The Woodstock is a better form factor, and the LEDs are retro cool, but many of them have been fried by people trying to “test” them with an AC adapter and no or dead batteries.

Panamatik makes a replacement PCB for fried Woodstocks, so that’s a good option.

For day to day non-scientific number crunching, very little beats a 12C or 17bii.

A 41X from Swiss Micro is awesome, but the benefits are mostly for those who want to explore the vast library of software modules/ROMs, or write their own code for the 41 series.

Old HP calcs aren’t cheap, but they’re not unobtanium either. Buy one or a dozen, and play around to see what you enjoy most.