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Low-end Laptops?
cryingpoet writes: "I remember the good old days, before everyone wanted a cell phone or PDA, back when you could buy a used laptop for $80 (USD). Now all the affordable laptops have hit the recycling bins as raw materials for new screens. To make matters worse, the state of the economy has driven companies to stop upgrading and keep all used laptops "in-house." Most used laptops run twice their cpu clock speed in dollars [$ = MHz * 2($/MHz)]. Auction prices seem to be worse than that of wholeseller. So I come to you, /.ers, in the hopes that there are still some used laptop deals to be had. Is there such a thing as a low-end used laptop anymore, and where?"
Is there such a thing as a low-end used laptop anymore, and where?
I've had good luck at ham fests and swap meets and the like for stuff like this. In this case, "low-end" means Pentium 133 or thereabouts, but the price is usually okay.
I remember someone with a whole truck full of laptops from the Department of Agriculture at a hamfest I went to last year.
--saint
I think you can still find some pentium based laptops on ebay for around $200 or so. It's more than the $80 that you were talking about, but I think it's quite reasonable.
For something like that, it's only really useful for terminal and low end word processing / browsing use, but that might be enough for you.
I think the other thing is that people don't need to upgrade their laptops that much anymore either: most pII based laptops have enough to run the stuff that people want to run anyway. It might not be just that the upgrade cycles have gotten longer because of the economy.
I've found decent deals at all of the above. But ebay has to triumph them all if you've got patience and are willing to spend some time digging into it. Locally, if you're in a major city, check out the classifieds, local BBS, etc. Remember though, never be afraid to haggle, even with a store. I've gotten my price more often than not, and usually on a 1$=1Mhz basis. Remember though, a bargain is only a bargain if it does what you want it to do.
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Try digging around on mail-order hardware mecca pricewatch under "not exactly new". There are some good deals to be found there.
Your best bet at this point may be a handheld of some kind that can easily synchronize with whatever host OS's you'll be running without getting in your way or pissing you off; unfortunately, far too few user interfaces these days meet these criteria, but you may get lucky if you shop around. (I've heard great things about the Newton even allowing for the occasionally blinded enthusiasm of Apple owners, but I'd imagine that like the original Beboxes, very few people are willing to part with them.) My recommendation at this time would be to find something cheap that works, and use it as a stopgap while the marketplace continues to evolve. Monoculture has been the default for too long, and we're way overdue for an explosion of novelty.
Fuck Slashdot
If you live near a university or college computer store, often times you can get a good deal on a laptop there, or else checkout some of the local, smaller dingy used computer stores While some of their laptops are often over-priced, a lot of them are quite reasonably priced, and haggling a little bit usually can't hurt.
Just checked out half.com for some deals on Thinkpads (most Linux friendly laptops currently on the planet). A 760EL can be had for around US$215. That's a decent price for a machine for doing email and web browsing (if you're not in a hurry).
****
"I'd never want to join a club that would have me as a member" - G. Marx
I ran into the same problem last year - I wanted something that I could take around with me, I didn't even care if it had a battery, AC power is fine as long as it had a NIC and large screen.
I got lucky and found a off-name brand laptop (Eurocom, a Canadian company who sells high-end laptops to education/government types).
Being a low-income student, I had two choices - a $300-400 pentium (P200ish) laptop with tiny screen or start up another loan and go for an off-lease $1000 machine that was far more than I needed. I feel your pain!
I got lucky on eBay - found a Eurocom (14" TFT / 350MHz AMD / 128MB) and paid relatively little for it (similar laptops at the time were over $1000). Off-name laptops have been good to me - do a few searches before hand though, as there may be some problems with embedded sound/video cards and linux support. No problems for me though.
The shameless plug: I lost my job recently and I had to choose between rent and selling the laptop. The upside is in a few months, I hope to have a better paying job (graduating in a month!) and will probably buy an off-name again. Maybe even new.
The auction is up here.
Other tips: Buy a mini keyboard, optical mouse and a few other trinkets for it too - I tried for a while to use the original keyboard, but when surfaces are too high, it gets uncomfortable REAL quick. It's a little more hassle, but bending your wrists in awkward angles for a few hours at a time is *not* a good idea.
A laptop would never replace my home machine but like my Palm VX, it complements wonderfully.
Good luck!
The reason is probably that people who got laptops way back when (when they were cheap) are hanging on cause they are most likely computer competent (or sold them to hackers). Thus those competent people are gonna hang onto it, put linux onto it and use it for fun stuff.
If you're looking for laptops (old ones) there's a lot of Universities that sell the old ones that the profs have no use for. Check those out (huuuuugeeeee bargains, plus they'll have some interesting confidential information, if you're lucky).
internet like monkeys'
I've posted the answer before here. Doesn't seem like anyone read it.
Linux at home
I've got some good deals well using Hacker Salvage. Hacker Salvage
If you live in a large enough major metro area, you could always check out liquidation auctions...
I've gone to the Homelife auction, the iXL.com and Pencom.com auction, and the prices for laptops were prety low. Granted, some were broken, but the ones that worked were only, like, a hundred twenty bucks or so.
I got some good harware cheap, like a desktop Compaq 233MMX with no ram and no optical drive for twenty bucks. Saw a Thinkpad sell for $50, a Libretto for 60, etc.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Guess what? You will never hear the real story.
There is a budget shortfall and guess what is getting slashed?
That whole maine thing was a was for Apple to get lots of free press.
http://packetnexus.com
http://www.toshibalaptops.com -- ask for Julia at x2134 if you call. These people have taken great care of me, and you can get great deals on refurb Dells that come in and Pentium era laptops can be had for $300.
Once you're out the doors with something from Best Buy, it's yours. It's corporate policy that the loss prevention folk (the guy in yello by the door who checks your bags) are not to chase after you. Reason being is a few years back an employee got shot while chasing a guy on foot. Your biggest worry is that if it's something expensive they will notify the police and give them a tape of you doing it.
I once watched a security tape that was distributed to all the stores of a guy stealing a laptop. Plain as day, he walked up to the thing, unbolted the lock and walked out of the store with it. The salesmen are supposed to watch the notebooks a bit better now.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
I dno't work for them
can the iBook run a Window applications at all competently?
Most Mac applications run in a window; very few run in the full screen, and they're mostly either media players or games. And if you meant Windows with an S (wouldn't that be Sindows?), Connectix Virtual PC handles that quite nicely.
What sort of equivalent Intel CPU does it emulate?
Pentium MMX family. Clock speed may vary, but last time I checked, its video drivers were hardware accelerated. Windows 9x was highly responsive last time I tried VPC (on a 233 MHz original bondi blue iMac).
I'd do an iBook in a heartbeat, except that my key application is available only for Windows.
Which application is that? Have you used it in Virtual PC? (Used, not guessed.) And have you written the maintainer about the platform support issue?
(Funny: Virtual PC is now available for Windows. It's a vmware clone.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
I worked (past tense thankfully) at Staples a while back, and I'd like to correct this. Official company policy is to let the bastards run away, and just grab a licence plate/description of the person, and then let the police do their job. The explanation I got was that it was to prevent employees from playing hero and getting shot in the face or the like.
check out http://onlinelaptops.com/
I've bought 3 used laptops from this store, for my office & have had good luck with them all. They are friendly & helpful when you have a problem, and all of the laptops come with a warranty. The batteries aren't usually warrantied though, which makes sense considering some of these laptops are 7-8 yrs old. I think they get them off lease from the military & large companies.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
... when it comes to buying a used laptop. Your GHz machine will be of little use to you if there are dead pixels, sticky keys, bad batteries, malfunctioning drives and/or ports, etc.
A few months ago, I picked up a used laptop from E-bay. It was from a reseller who purchased refurbished units from Dell which were on a corporate lease. There were tons of them selling at once, and I got a decent PIII for under $600. I was only moderately satisfied, as there were problems that couldn't be fixed (one of the PC-Card slots doesn't work and the left Ctrl key works only half the time, but the battery is still good). Some advice that I can offer from this experience includes:
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
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"How would this sentence be different if pi equaled 3?"
I've had it happen twice when leaving a store, the security gate would beep. Both times it was because the cashier forgot to demagnetize the merchandise (no, it wasn't magnetic media I'd bought ;-) )
I stayed calm and told the security guard there must've been something gone wrong, and had him check the coupon and demagnetize the items. No need to get angry or run away, IMHO.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
It's not a general purpose laptop (a Z80 likely will never run Linux!), but the AlphaSmart "portable writing tool" (think TRS-80 Model 100 replacement but with a warantee, that looks to your system like a PS/2 keyboard or USB device for file upload/download) is about $200 U.S. and runs forever on AA batteries. A friend's son uses it for notetaking in class, and swears by it.
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