Buying 2nd Hand Laptops

Could someone recommend a good source to purchase one of these?

Second not being able to splash on a new one could someone tell me
whether say a Pentium 3 with 256 Ram would effectively run WinXP?

Thanks

 

Factor in the cost of a replacement battery (which can be a
very expensive) when buying a second-hand laptop. Many have
batteries that will run for a few minutes at most.

Presumably /just/ running XP isn't the issue - it is whether
it will give accpetable performance running your intended
applications. In which case, saying what you intent to use
the laptop for would be useful!

Bear in mind also that you may find that the laptop is not
fully functional using XP, an operating system it was not
designed for - the PC card may not work, the graphics
adapter may only work in a basic way, the fax-modem may not
work at all, etc. I have three laptops here that suffer from
this, even though XP appears to run ok at first glance.

You need to research this thoroughly, once you know which
make/model you intend to buy.

 

Buffy posted:

Why not order a demo disk from Microsoft, install it as a Dual-boot system
to see if it works. 's what I did before I upgraded a friends laptop (P3
700 mhz, 10 gig hd, 256 meg ram, Dell). It all worked fine. He then went
and bought XP and installed it fully, (well, I did it for her) with all her
settings, mails, documents completely intact ..

 

I've bought at least 3 second hand laptops from eBay and half.com on a
number of occasions. One came in with poor hinges, but the seller
immediately shipped out a set. But be absolutely certain you're willing to
take a risk with your money...nothing is for sure! Paypal has an option for
a few extra dollars that supposedly guarantees your satisfaction...never had
to test it though.

As for the PIII, I have installed XP on all three of these laptops. One has
128 meg PIII 750MHz, another has 256 meg PIII 500MHz, and my own has 512
meg/PIII 750 (used to be 500). I've even had XP run 'satisfactorily' on a
PII 400 with 128 megs of RAM, but it was definately having a hard time of
it.

I have so far not experienced any driver/hardware issues with any of the
above 4 Dell laptops (two Inspirons, two Lattitudes) when changing from
Win98 to WinXP.

 

If you absolutely have to run XP then get a CPU at least 550mhz, 256mb
ram is minimum to get some decent performance out of it. If you have to
choose between an extra 100mhz or so or some extra ram go for the ram.

 

My IBM R31 runs XP Pro no sweat. 1Ghz PIII-M CPU, 256 Mhz RAM, 200Gb HD.
Extra DIMM slot for more RAM. It's two years old. If I were to buy a 2nd
hand laptop I'd visit a computer swap market so you can actually see the
thing running. In my city they run them regularly as a place where
reputable computer shops can get rid of trade-ins and superceded stock.
Caveat emptor of course. I'd avoid Ebay. Technologically, anything over
three years old is a dead duck. If anything breaks it'll be hard or
costly to replace.

--
Parko
Registered Linux User #339345
Defenestrate Windows!
And now for something completely different...
http://www.parko-polishes.com/

 

Try here:
http://www.morgancomputers.co.uk/

I've had two Toshiba laptops from them ,a Portege 7020CDT which is now
obsolescent, and my current one, a Tecra 9000 which has just had an upgraded
HDD and I'm just about to take the RAM from 512MB to 1GB. This one (933MHz
Pentium) runs XP perfectly!

 

Err, 20Gb. oooops!
--
Parko
Registered Linux User #339345
Defenestrate Windows!
And now for something completely different...
http://www.parko-polishes.com/