[Nottingham] Buying a Laptop

[Robert Hart]

On Wed, 2005-10-12 at 11:55 +0100, Edam wrote:
> On 11.10.2005 4:51 pm, Edgar wrote:
> > I looking to buy a laptop. Looking at spending 600 to 900 pounds. Does anyone 
> 
> We just got a laptop of eBay for £250 (including postage). I can't really
> comment on linux compatability issues, but in terms of price, I recon
> eBay's worth a look for laptops.

But look with caution. Make especially sure that you read what they
"aren't saying" as well as what they are. I have bought two laptops from
ebay, (and also an iBook brand new), and would say I was *reasonably*
happy with them, but:

The first one, bought a 5-6 years ago, didn't have a floppy disk drive,
although I would have expected one on a laptop at the time. The second
one had many issues including poor battery life, dodgy screen (which I
repaired with a bit of soldering, but the VGA port hasn't worked since),
and extreme unreliability (eventually diagnosed as bad RAM, but only
after a year or so of frequent crashes and infrequent filesystem
corruption (on windows)).

I guess my point is, that the price difference between new and second
hand is a lot less than it used to be, so if you have the budget for a
new machine, it may turn out to be cheaper in the long run.

Rob

-- 
Robert Hart <enxrah at nottingham.ac.uk>
University of Nottingham


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