reconditioned lap top

corrieflash

looking to buy reconditioned lap top for personal use nothing fancy, but able to use for internet access.
Have been looking at laptopcentre and wondered if anyone had bought anything from there and if it was ok.

new to posting so hope I've done it right
Thanks

alanwjones

Hi and welcome to the forums, I have had a look at the site you mentioned and the cheapest laptop I found is around £190, There is some advice on cheap laptops HERE see post no 4 on Dell prices. Hth. Alan.

Edit. See HERE ALSO
click on laptops.

buglawton

Refurbs, the Thinkpads are nice I got one here, they have some IBM warranty left on them,
http://www.tier1online.com/Laptops

Avoid less than a Gig of memory

corrieflash

thanks for your help will go have a look
kath

Donnie

Reconditioned laptops offer very poor value. Also consider that battery life is likely to be relatively short, plus you may need to purchase extra RAM.

A fairly ridiculous claim on the Tier1 website: "This D600 laptop is a high specification with 256mb of RAM gives you plenty of grunt to cope with the most demanding of applications!"

Anything less than 512MB with XP will have problems, sooner or later.

Pinch of salt methinks.

Laptopcentre? Just forget the idea, some of their cheaper laptops don't even have a built in optical drive.

£150 max should be your limit. If you need to spend more, pick up one of the new Dells for £260.

buglawton

I ignored the hype on Tier1 and bought one of their good spec T42 Thinkpads (did mention in my post - avoid anything under 1GB). Was even able to use the remnant IBM/Lenovo warranty to get some valuable tech support. So let's not rubbish this idea out of hand.

Tier1 also had some 12" x31 Thinkpads (XP/1GB/P4/Firewire/External DVD) for £250 with code, these are hard to get hold of under any circumstances and are perfect travel machines with built-in WiFi.

ollyk

Look at DSG (any dixons currys etc) they have reconned laptops listed I was going to go for one but then I saw THIS Dell offer with half price wireless keyboard and free shipping and decided to pay the extra and then I will sell the keyboard & mouse on ebay so hope to have paid an effective price of about £290 for a very nice machine!
Oh that doesn't include quidco @ 5% which for whatever reason I can't get to work for Dell (and yes I disabled every bit of spyware and firewalls etc and left my computer wide open trying :mad: ). That could have been as little as £275 (I am hoping I will sell the keyboard for about £35 or thereabouts).

buglawton

Note that on that offer it says: "Due to unprecedented demand for this system, we regret to inform you of a prolonged delivery time on your order"

ollyk

buglawton wrote: »

Note that on that offer it says:"Due to unprecedented demand for this system, we regret to inform you of a prolonged delivery time on your order"

I know, my lappy should be with me at least by the 7/5 - apparently due to the LG fire in Southern Korea wiping out a major source of batteries :rolleyes:

The only thing that worries me is where they are going to source these batteries from and if they will be subject to the usual QC issues.

I am not sure how this changes the value of the deal tho still hot for me!

PROLIANT

Donnie wrote: »

Reconditioned laptops offer very poor value. Also consider that battery life is likely to be relatively short, plus you may need to purchase extra RAM.

A fairly ridiculous claim on the Tier1 website: "This D600 laptop is a high specification with 256mb of RAM gives you plenty of grunt to cope with the most demanding of applications!"

Anything less than 512MB with XP will have problems, sooner or later.

Pinch of salt methinks.

Laptopcentre? Just forget the idea, some of their cheaper laptops don't even have a built in optical drive.

£150 max should be your limit. If you need to spend more, pick up one of the new Dells for £260.

I will second that, 256MB of RAM will NOT run Windows XP, it may let you boot up the machine but you will find that you will not be doing very much. Refurb laptops are false economy, you can buy a half decent machine today for £250-£300 ish with a decent CPU like a Pentium-class Dual core and at least 1 GB of RAM, I deal with companies who pedal second-hand/refurb laptops on a frequent basis in my line of work, I only buy refurb laptops for Engineers who require legacy features like a parallel port and RS232 9 Way D socket etc, they are more trouble than they are worth.

buglawton

Saying "Avoid less than a Gig of memory" in my initial post about refurbs does not seem to have prevented statements of the obvious from following.