Cheap laptop wanted

[SilverSaloon]

Hi.

i need a cheap laptop. Nothing special, but it must:

(a) be able to run windows xp
(b) have a good battery (so i can run it on the battery aswell as on the mains)
(c) have usb port

basically if it can run Word and browse the internet then i'm happy.

please pm me if you have one and at what price (include postage in the uk please!!)

i dont need any software on it as i can put that all on there myself.

thanks

derek

 

[crockers]

Not sure many people will be willing to pass on a used laptop as data may still be on it .. you need to contact a specialist who has completely cleaned the hard drive first... even a reformat doesn't clear the data..

 

[Mark300SL]

Give the Dell vostros a look

from £199 delivered !

http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/products/features.aspx/4x_vostro_1000?c=uk&cs=ukbsdt1&l=en&s=bsd

 

[SilverSaloon]

i think the majority of people who have used one for home-use would be happy with formatting the drive and selling on..... the 1st thing i would be doing is formatting it and sticking my own version of windows on it etc. i understand maybe a big business would be more wary but a general user wouldnt worry about this, i expect. i've sold many old computers in my time when i upgrade and i have just formatted the drive and re-installed windows.

 

[stevesey]

But discs can be unformatted and a lot of data recovered - best to use a shredding utility that writes 1010101 pattern across the whole disk (several times for the paranoid).

 

[Will]

I wonder what the overall risk is though, as said - it depends on how 'confidential' the data is.

What % of people would go to the lengths of randomly buying complete laptops (from non-specific home users etc) and then extensively trying to recover data (that they don't even know will contain?).

Yet people will happily carry laptops all over the place, leave them on desks unattended, in cars, offices, lying around at home etc.

What about the government data that regularly seems to go missing...

Not trying to 'play down' the risk, just putting it into perspective

Will

 

[ibrar]

If you are to get a new laptop and wish the battery life to remain lengthy, please take this point into consideration. When using your laptop in the mains, please withdraw the battery (unless it needs charging) as this will adversely affect its life span.

 

[Spinal]

But discs can be unformatted and a lot of data recovered - best to use a shredding utility that writes 1010101 pattern across the whole disk (several times for the paranoid).

Actually... if you are truly paranoid like me, any pattern that you re-write again and again isn't secure You want something that does (at least):
- 7 passes
- one of which is a fill 0,
- one of which is a fill 1
- one of which is a random 0 or 1

I've found Darik's boot and nuke ( http://www.dban.org/ ) to be VERY effective in these cases... I burn a disk, pop it into the duplicator and then put the disk on every machine that we are decomissioning... The day after I'm fairly happy that we can send the machines away safely!

Michele

 

[seymansey]

If you are to get a new laptop and wish the battery life to remain lengthy, please take this point into consideration. When using your laptop in the mains, please withdraw the battery (unless it needs charging) as this will adversely affect its life span.

Not sure how true this is, I have a three year old dell which sits on a docking station at work all day and i leave to standby in the evenings in my bag and i still get 3 hours or more off the orignal battery life of about 4 hours.

 

[Rory]

Not sure how true this is, I have a three year old dell which sits on a docking station at work all day and i leave to standby in the evenings in my bag and i still get 3 hours or more off the orignal battery life of about 4 hours.

That's very unusual in my experience (of several Dells, IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads and Compaq) - the batteries deteriorate pretty rapidly.

If you take into account the cost of buying an original (Dell, Toshiba etc) replacement battery then you're well on the well to buying one of the cheaper new laptops these days (although cheap laptops tend to have low capacity batteries).

All my old laptops are passed on to family members so I'm supporting a whole bunch of them but a cold hard look would probably show that they're more trouble than they're worth.

 

[Frank O' Phile]

Look on Ebay for a Toshiba Sat pro 6100. Good spec machine and pretty reliable.

thats where a I got mine and on which I'm composing this epistle,

I've added a couple of cheap upgrades to it and so far everything has worked fine and...100010100100010010010000100100101010111010100100101010001
01011010010100101010010010101010100101000101010010010100010101010
0101010101001000101011011101010101110101101101011010010101010101001001
10101010011010101101010abcf1010101010101001000100100100100100100010010001
110001010100010010010010010010001011110101010100110110011001101011

 

[gaz_l]

Actually... if you are truly paranoid like me, any pattern that you re-write again and again isn't secure You want something that does (at least):
- 7 passes
- one of which is a fill 0,
- one of which is a fill 1
- one of which is a random 0 or 1

I've found Darik's boot and nuke ( http://www.dban.org/ ) to be VERY effective in these cases... I burn a disk, pop it into the duplicator and then put the disk on every machine that we are decomissioning... The day after I'm fairly happy that we can send the machines away safely!

Michele

You're not even mildly paranoid.. if you really want to get rid of everything, you'll be wanting to use this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutmann_method

Although I personally prefer our only approved method of sanitisation.. a very large sledgehammer . I keep used hard drives for when I'm having a bad day and need to let off some steam.. something very therapeutic about wanton destruction .

Cheers,

Gaz

 

[para alpha]

100010100100010010010000100100101010111010100100101010001
01011010010100101010010010101010100101000101010010010100010101010
0101010101001000101011011101010101110101101101011010010101010101001001
10101010011010101101010abcf1010101010101001000100100100100100100010010001
110001010100010010010010010010001011110101010100110110011001101011

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