used laptop question.

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Darrell

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I am thinking about buying a used laptop for my music collection which is at about 15000 songs. I will also take it to the bar so it's playing music for 16 hours a day.

I have a Dell inspiron 1520 that is 3 years old and has been faultless so far.

I have seen the Inspiron 1720 model on ebay for around 250 quid. Or should I look at other brands.

Has anyone bought re-con or used laptop this way?
 
Considering you can buy a half decent New LAPTOP for less than £300 with a warranty!! £250 SEEMS A TAD PRICEY!
 
I bought a Thinkpad T61 off eBay few weeks and I'm delighted with it - it's exactly the same as one I already (it's sequentially 19 numbers apart in the serial number!) and appears never to have been used (although it's 4yrs old). It did get a bit lost on its way to me which was slightly scary but once the seller sent the tracking number I could see it absolutely wasn't his fault, it sat in a depot for 4 days.

As I understand it, as long as you use PayPal and don't do anything daft like buy it outside of eBay etc, you're pretty well 100% protected.
 
Considering you can buy a half decent New LAPTOP for less than £300 with a warranty!! £250 SEEMS A TAD PRICEY!

That's true - I bought another T61 as hate 16:9 widescreen and wanted another 4:3. But I wanted to upgrade to Windows7 Pro and to buy it retail it costs £170. I've noticed you can buy brand-new laptops with it loaded for £300 ish.

Don't know anything about the machine, but this offer (£100 cashback) was emailed to me the other day: HP 620 Core 2 Duo T6670 2.2GHz 4GB 320GB 15.6" Windows 7 Professional 64 bit + Free Carry Case (WT138EA#ABU) - dabs.com

and DABS have a bunch of Lenovo (and presumably other) laptops for the low £300's.
 
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When you look at new laptops, they range in price from ~£300 to ~£1,500, and indeed their are differences in brand, performance, display quality, size/weight, warranty, and other features.

However, they loose their value as second-hand units. The simple reason is that an entry-level new laptop is likely to be faster - and have higher spec, e.g. memory and hard disk size - then a top-of-the range laptop of 2 years old. And even well-known brand names such as Dell, Acer and HP are now selling ~£300 laptops.

So in my opinion it always makes more sense to buy a new basic branded model than an old high-end model. This is why old high-end models have minuscule resale value. It may have cost a thousand Pounds three years ago, but it's worth fifty quid now, if that...

This is why I never understood why 'professional' thieves still steal laptops - and many of our customers have laptops stolen on almost regular basis - if I were the kind of person who buys stolen goods, I would not have paid more than £20-£30 for one - not with eBay around anyway selling legit ones.

Personally, I never tried selling an old laptop, and I had quite a few... I usually re-house my old ones for free with those friends and relatives who are happy to have them. I feel that if I charge anyone anything for a 3-yaers old laptop, I'd be robbing them blind...
 
Remember, hard drives usually work perfectly well right up to the moment they suffer catastrophic failure. There's no guarantee a new machine won't fail, but it will have a guarantee, unlike a used one. As you have a lot of data, consider an external backup drive. They're so cheap it's almost a sin not to have one.

Having bought my son a high end HP laptop for his university course I'll never buy anything from them again. It suffered from serious overheating and the "flip-the-screen-around-to-turn-it-into-a-touchscreen-tablet" (long before ipads were invented) failed as well. As these faults revealed themselves about two days after the warranty expired, HP were not interested. Searching the intertubes showed I was by no means alone, the faults being very common. I contacted HP again with the evidence of faulty design and manufacture, but apparently this wasn't faulty design or manufacture at all. They just happened to be a series of similar individual failures, nothing to do with them.
 
Remember, hard drives usually work perfectly well right up to the moment they suffer catastrophic failure. There's no guarantee a new machine won't fail, but it will have a guarantee, unlike a used one. As you have a lot of data, consider an external backup drive. They're so cheap it's almost a sin not to have one.

Having bought my son a high end HP laptop for his university course I'll never buy anything from them again. It suffered from serious overheating and the "flip-the-screen-around-to-turn-it-into-a-touchscreen-tablet" (long before ipads were invented) failed as well. As these faults revealed themselves about two days after the warranty expired, HP were not interested. Searching the intertubes showed I was by no means alone, the faults being very common. I contacted HP again with the evidence of faulty design and manufacture, but apparently this wasn't faulty design or manufacture at all. They just happened to be a series of similar individual failures, nothing to do with them.


We buy quite a lot of HP kit, and find their service to be actually very good - but this is for their business machines. I did hear stories similar to your own from customers who bought privately products from HP's consumer line. But then again their business equipment is far more expensive - so I suppose reducing the level of service to consumers is just HP's way of competing with the very low Retail (both on-line high-street) prices these days. Still unjustified in my opinion...
 
Searching the intertubes showed I was by no means alone, the faults being very common. I contacted HP again with the evidence of faulty design and manufacture, but apparently this wasn't faulty design or manufacture at all. They just happened to be a series of similar individual failures, nothing to do with them.

I must speak up for Dell in that regard. My daughter's laptop had the famous Dell "vertical line" issue on the screen. OK, it's a bit difficult to hide from such a major problem as that caused Dell, but the model my daughter had wasn't noted as being affected.

It took a bit of a battle but I made contact with a customer services rep through a Dell forum and they sent a repair technician to the house to replace the screen on a 33mth old laptop that only had a 12mth warranty.
 
Doesn't sound like a massive saving. Warranty with a new one for piece of mind may be worth it.
 
When looking for cheapness I tend to go for a refurb unit from Laptops Direct or similar, plenty to choose from under 300 quid and all will play a bit of music.

Don't forget that the onboard sound on most laptops is a bit noisy, Peavey USB-P BUS Powered USB Audio Interface DI Box | DV247 will help :)
 
When looking for cheapness I tend to go for a refurb unit from Laptops Direct or similar, plenty to choose from under 300 quid and all will play a bit of music.

Don't forget that the onboard sound on most laptops is a bit noisy, Peavey USB-P BUS Powered USB Audio Interface DI Box | DV247 will help :)
 

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