Cheap used laptop prices- Buying a second hand Dell, Toshiba, IBM, Sony, HP or Apple Notebook

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If I could only give one word of advice about buying a cheap used laptop, it would be "Don't." Fortunately, talk is cheap so I'll go on at length about when it does or doesn't make sense to buy second hand and how much to pay for different capacity models, but the keep this in mind. With a little patience, you can always find a cheap laptop deal with manufacturer and store rebates, and usually priced around $500. For that, you'll get a brand new laptop with Windows XP installed, a big hard drive, a combination DVD player - CD Recorder, build in USB 2.0, 56K modem, 100BaseT network connection and probably wireless as well. The screen will be bigger and the unit will be lighter than any notebook you're likely to find used, plus the battery will be new, so you'll actually be able to work untethered for more than 20 minutes (for the first few months).

However, not everybody has a rich uncle or a sibling to give them a second hand laptop for free, so there's a market for used notebooks, everywhere from ebay to newspaper adds, company-to-employee sales to PC shops, and of course, Internet sites. The major used laptop sellers on the Internet are usually selling reconditioned or remanufactured units, where reconditioned basically means they turned it on and it worked and remanufactured means something was broken so they replaced it. Factory second means it failed the final test at the factory, so instead of shipping it, the reworked it on the spot and didn't sell it as new. All that makes it sound like there will be bargains galore available, but here's the bad news.

There are actually more brand name laptops than desktops these days, with the most popular models being the Dell Latitude, Toshiba Satellite, Sony Vaio, HP Pavilion, IBM Thinkpad and Apple iBook. Most of these models have been around forever, which means you can't just buy a Thinkpad and assume that you're getting a recent IBM laptop. The Thinkpad, Sony Vaio and the Apple Powerbooks probably hold their value a little better than the other brands, because they are rarely sold at deep discounts, even on closeout. However, I don't see any reason to pay for name recognition in a cheap used laptop, and notebooks that are still operating after a couple years are well beyond any initial quality concerns. Don't be surprised if every Satellite you see has a dead battery.

Second hand laptop prices are always discounted from their list price. Their original list price! You couldn't find a laptop priced for less than a grand a few years ago. A company that bought a bunch of cheap laptops a few years back for a $1000 each and is now upgrading them to new laptops will offer them to employees at 50% off. The employees think it's a great bargain and pay $500 for obsolete junk (often with the software removed if the company is conscientious) when they could be buying a brand new laptop for the same price that's several generations better. I'm not exaggerating here, it happens all the time.

The same thing happens with the reconditioned notebooks sold over the Internet or on ebay. The seller says, "List price $1,699" or "I paid $2,349" but they're talking about a retail laptop prices without rebates that are three or five years old. Look carefully at the capabilities of these notebooks. If they were really high-end at the time, the CPU speed might be a little higher than the $500 new laptop with rebates, but it probably won't have as much memory, may not have a DVD player, if it has wireless, it will be an external adapter, the battery will be on its last legs, and the screen will have dead pixels. The model that "listed" at $1,699 will be promoted as a steal at $795, and the $2,349 laptop (with "$1,000 of software I added") will have a minimum bid of $1200. They may get it to, but not from you (I hope). You should be buying a tremendous new laptop for that kind of money, with a new warrantee, and all the latest bells and whistles for loading your digital camera film, etc.

Then ,you finally find some cheap used laptop prices, between $200 and $400. Sounds a lot better on the face of it, but I just did some Internet shopping and lets see what I came up with. The "Special" on one of the Internet's top sites was a 650 MHz HP notebook Pentium III with Windows 98. They were selling it for $429 before shipping and handling. That's six year old technology! No wireless, an 18 GB hard drive (cheap new notebooks ship with 60 GB hard drives, three times the capacity), and while I like Windows 98, Windows XP is required for all manner of new software. The same store offers a whole range of used laptop models for $299, all with tiny hard drive (6 GB), or 1/10 of what you'd get in a $500 new model), Windows 98, 128 MB of RAM and CPU speeds under 400 MHz!! These are typical prices for used notebooks, and you're paying 60% of the price of a new laptop that will actually do everything you want for one that won't run software you need and can't be upgraded. All over the Internet I see second hand laptops with Pentium III CPU's selling for between $500 and $1000, advertised as bargains, it's just insane.

Here's my basic price list for buying notebooks in the price range of $500 or under.

$500 Buy a brand new laptop with factory and store rebates. Make sure you fill out the rebate paperwork correctly. You'll get a Celeron or AMD processor in the 1.3 GHz to 1.7 GHz range, 256MB to 512 MB RAM, a 40 GB to 80 GB hard drive, a DVD/CD player/burner, USB 2.0, 100BaseT, built in wireless 802.11G, a 1 year warranty, Windows XP installed

$399-$499 I wouldn't consider buying a second hand laptop in this range unless it was less than a year old and featured specs much better than the model above, like a super light weight (under 3 pounds), or a DVD recorder, plus a legal, licensed version of Microsoft Office. I wouldn't call it a bargain, but it's not a bad deal.

$299-$399 Same as above, except I wouldn't expect to find a DVD recorder in something this old. Any build in wireless will likely be 802.11b, which is much slower, but workable. I wouldn't touch a CPU under 1 GHz in this price range, whatever the model, and I'd still be looking for Microsoft Office to be installed.

$199-$299 I wouldn't buy a second hand laptop in this price range period, unless it was as good as the laptops listed above. It's just a really bad price point where you get conned into thinking you're saving money, but you end up having thrown away half the price of a new laptop on something you'll never be happy with.

$99-$199 A Pentium III or an AMD K6 CPU in the 350Mhz to 600MHz range, with Windows 98, 64 MB - 128 MB RAM, a 56K modem, USB 1.1, a CD Recorder and a battery that holds a charge for at least a half hour. You wouldn't throw away a hundred or two hundred bucks on a TV that couldn't receive cable, so why do it with a used laptop?

Free - $99 If I really needed a cheap laptop just to type on or get e-mail, I'd settle for anything with Windows 95 or better and an internal modem (probably 28K or 33K) that worked. If it's free, you can take it home and try it. If you're paying, make the seller demonstrate it dialing into their ISP and getting an Internet connection. Test the CD drive as well if you want to be able to try installing new software, it will be a CD-ROM (reader only).