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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
as long as you can run faster than the security guards at Best Buy.
Also they gave every 7th grader in maine an ibook this year, and those kids usually go down with one punch. :)
yes i run a goth/punk/emo porn site.
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.
Although it only comes with a basic drawing program and a monochrome screen, many can be found for less than $10. Also nobody at work has noticed that my PDA is really a Game Boy Advance.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
I've found decent deals at all of the above. But ebay has to triumph them all if you've got patience and are willing to spend some time digging into it. Locally, if you're in a major city, check out the classifieds, local BBS, etc. Remember though, never be afraid to haggle, even with a store. I've gotten my price more often than not, and usually on a 1$=1Mhz basis. Remember though, a bargain is only a bargain if it does what you want it to do.
Find out about my new childrens book: SS Death Camp Criminal Batallion Go To Monte Carlo For The Massacre
what about ebay? no one has mentioned ebay? has anyone mentioned ebay?
I kid you not. T&A (Don't mock the name!) travel centers sell low end laptops to truckers, and they also sell these internet access cards that allow them to check their e-mail and to basic web stuff at any of the other T&A truck stops. The card includes minutes, both for the internet access, and the cost of making the phone call from the truck stop, but the laptops they sell on the side, and I've seen them being sold from $100-$250.
They're really the greatest places - you can also buy TV's that'll fit in your truck, portable fridges, and tv dinners in cardboard boxes that'll heat themselves up! (Sterno included.) Every time I'm driving cross country it's the only place I stop, and you know when you're getting close, because they advertise on CB channel 19. (Which isn't exactly legal, but hell, nobody cares, and truckers love 'em.)
Oh yeah. They also have mechanics on duty, showers, 24 hour decent resturants, and all the jolt you could want.
One problem is people are keeping old notebooks longer. They may not run an app you need but they make great Internet terminals while sitting on the couch. My wife uses an old IBM 600E for Internet surfing. If she actually ran apps on it we would have sold it and upgraded ages ago, but there is no need.
At work we've given some old notebooks to users for this very reason instead of selling them.
That's nirvana - picking up a low-end laptop and running Linux on it. After all, Linux runs find on modest hardware. And, the latest laptops have all this freaky hardware which doesn't seem to want to run with Linux.
The reality is that laptops aren't all that cheap. They have components (namely the battery) which tends to crap out fairly early in life. I've tried to do the same thing. Find a cheap laptop I can use (even if it's still plugged in) to do usefull stuff.
Unfortunately I don't have a good answer for you. The prices for the used stuff aren't great. They have parts that are lighter and tend to break faster. They have slower bus speeds and clock speeds than desktops. They tend to take less ram (used may only accomodate 256 Meg), they have small, expensive drives, and both ram and drives are expensive to upgrade. They have very limitted resolution screens (especially used).
If you need a box, I think you might be better served with used desktops on shear price. If you need the protability - I would look for a less expensive but new laptop. I don't think used saves you much when you look at what you're getting.
Leave the gun, take the cannoli -- Clemenza, The Godfather
This looks like a WTB ad. Are we posting classified ads on /. now? Can I sell my used laptops and other gear? Wanna buy a firewall? How about my motorcycle?
Can't beat eBay. Got a Toshiba Satellite (P-120, 1.2 GB, 48 megs RAM) for only $65 -- including shipping! Installed Vector Linux on it and it purrs like a PIII. BTW, the 11-inch active matrix screen is absolutely mint. Didn't come with a CD, but I just laplink it with my PC to add large files. Schweet!
Try digging around on mail-order hardware mecca pricewatch under "not exactly new". There are some good deals to be found there.
It actually was the Laptop of my dad.
It was an IBM 286 Laptop.
I got it to run Win 3.1 (Linux wasnt a matter of discussion back then)
One of the only programs I could run on it was Word 2.0 and it took minutes to start.
Maybe you should define the term "low-end" a bit better. Or is there anyone who has an even older Laptop?
Btw: This Laptop was the only electronic thing in my house that was affected by the Y2k but it still works.
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
Dumpster, Thrift store, or Rescue Mission branch. My low-end laptop came from a dumpster where I used to work. It's a 486/33 with 32Mb of RAM and a 110Mb Hard drive. I put PC DOS 2000, QEMM 8, and GEOS 2.0 on it and it runs like flash.
Amazing how easy it is to adapt from MS Office to GEOS too...even easier than going to Word/Excel for DOS or even Works!
Just my 20 cents
Make America grate again!
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!
I have an old P100 that I got for $150 a year or so ago, from the local newspaper's classified ad section. I run Redhat 7.2 on it, and use it as a web server and NAT/firewall for my home LAN.
The downside with this is that PCMCIA ethernet cards are more expensive. The big upside, however, is that a laptop will continue to run on its own batteries should the power go out. Furthermore, you don't need to drag over a monitor and keyboard if for some reason you want to log in from the console, as you would with a non-laptop headless server.
Why not start your own computer cousulting business? You probably already fix computers anyway. Then you can write it off (it is like getting a 30% discount). You really should just go ahead and buy the laptop you really want-- $1500 will get you a decent machine with a color display, dvd, big hd, etc. Just admit it, you WILL be frusterated with a $200 end laptop. Buy it 12 months same as cash and pay it off! My 2cents...
you just THINK you do!!!
i have one, i never use the damn thing, its a shame after the $300 i spent hunting down all the parts & accessories i needed for it.
i work in a computer recycling center, we take donations of used equipment & refurbish it, we NEVER EVER get laptops, but that doesnt stop 99.999% of everybody that walks into the store from walking up to me & asking for a stupid goddamned laptop.
im going to print up signs to hang everywhere that say WE DONT HAVE LAPTOPS. it wont help tho.
The reason is probably that people who got laptops way back when (when they were cheap) are hanging on cause they are most likely computer competent (or sold them to hackers). Thus those competent people are gonna hang onto it, put linux onto it and use it for fun stuff.
If you're looking for laptops (old ones) there's a lot of Universities that sell the old ones that the profs have no use for. Check those out (huuuuugeeeee bargains, plus they'll have some interesting confidential information, if you're lucky).
internet like monkeys'
Where we really need improvements are with battery life and screens, and those are slow in coming along. There are some hard technological and design problems there (how do you fit a 17" screen into a 10" package without making your users look like the Borg?).
they have some *really* old ibm PII's for around 300 - 500$
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
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
A lot of non-mainstream mom-and-pop type computer stores keep old laptops around. I worked at a PC place in Denver for a while, and we had this huge stack of laptops and parts that were either given to us or left behind by their owners. I never got a chance to test them out, but the general concensus was that they were still functional.
..I came on /. to look up legislation for a paper on Internet Censorship, and ended up buying a laptop on eBay...and just when I was trying to quit eBay, thanks guys =/.
forget it.
I'm installing NetBSD on it, and it should cope fine. sendmail, fetchmail, mutt etc, and away you go. Don't automatically poopoo anything just because it seems outdated.
Cost of laptop £0, Cost of (budget;) pcmcia ethernet card £25. That's it. Simple.
You may not be able to impress your friends with all this pointy-clicky stuff, but you'll have the last laugh when they're on a train wrestling with the crappy trackpad / trackball / pencil erasor knob (like on the IBMs), and you can just sit down and tap out a few commands on the keyboard.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
I have one right here! I guess it has 33Mhz 486 (judging from the model-number) and color-screen (it says so next to the screen). It also has a built-in trackball. I'm still thinking that to do with it... In case you are wondering, it's AST Bravo 4/33s
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
The thing syncs up with Microsoft Active Sync to your Windows machine if you want to back up files or sync up with Outlook. The thing has an internal 56K modem, and is very useful.
All in all, I've been very very satisfied. But I want to get an iPaq, and I was thinking of selling it, so if anyone's interested...
Contrary to popular belief, I don't actually make my website for other people to look at.
$1 a Mhz isn't that great, I mean when you get up to a 200Mhz laptop they run around $200-$250 on ebay(last I checked) and you could get a desktop computer three times that fast and a lot newer for around the same price, I saw a 700Mhz PC over at TigerDirect for only $300. Sure, you pay for portability and size, but look in the sales ads, new laptops compared to new PCs around the same speed(in the GHz) isnt that widely varied. Maybe it's just me, but I don't think a p200 laptop should cost $250.
I know the obvious answer here are "Ebay" or "pricewatch" or whathaveye, but at the risk of bucking the trend, I've learned that the best deals now a days are comming more and more from simply having connections;
An example is a Compaq Armada (7380DMT, if you care) I bought used a little under a year ago; It was at a local computer sotre where I know the owner, and she knew I was in the market for a new(er) laptop; At the time, these machines where going for $450 easy on Ebay, but since I was already ready to buy, she was willing to cut me a deal because I was a willing buyer -- she woudln't have to go to the trouble of listing and shipping, and so I got it for $150 off the ebay price, or $300.
Now, I had to wait a few months in this scenario, and I really couldn't pick and choose, but since you're not wanting to spend much money, you probably don't care about picking and choosing anyway.
The reason I pick on ebay is that since more and more people areusing it, prices are being driven up to teh point that it's not always the best deal anymore.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
"Most used laptops run twice their cpu clock speed in dollars [$ = MHz * 2($/MHz)]"
I don't understand.
$ = MHz * 2($/MHz)
$ = 2 MHz * $/MHz
$ = 2 $ MHz^2
1/2 = MHz^2
Sqrt[2]/2 = MHz
Perhaps they meant "$ = 2 MHz", or "2 $ = MHz", but I'm not sure which from the sentance. Does anyone understand it?
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.
Both compgeeks and CSO have laptops right now, Geeks have two under Thinkpad PIIs for under $500 and CSO has some (dead ones) for $249.
"A gun is a tool, Marian. No better, no worse than any other tool. An axe, a shovel, or anything." Shane (1953)
I don't know about the real low end, but your $/MHz ratio certainly starts to break down even in the mid-range. I'm typing this on a laptop with a 600MHz CPU, that I just got from uBid for US$700 plus shipping, and I know that I could have gotten an even better $/MHz ratio with a bulkier machine. With that CPU and memory, USB, FireWire etc. this machine will still be viable a lot longer and ultimately provide more practical use per dollar than some low-end machine that's already at the end of its lifespan. Unless you're looking for something that will basically function as an embedded system (in which case you can skip the cost of a screen and get a true embedded SBC) I suggest you consider spending a little more to get a better overall value.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Make a trip to your nearest University that gives laptops to all incoming freshmen. Find said freshman and exchange a keg for the laptop. You'll get a decent laptop for about $50.
Taco could make a coin if he made a classified page
God spoke to me
It was a Zenith (who knew they made laptops) it had a blazing fast 8088 processor (yes I was too cheap to buy the 8086) it ran DOS like a dream it had an amazing 512kb ram it even had a 4.5lb lead acid battery most importantly? It had it's OS in solid state storage of some sort (CMOS or similar?) It flew down stairs, through baggage claims, twice to africa, out the back of a landrover at 70km/h and it still worked. I mourned the day that I picked it up and realized that not even my lowly 8088 could survive idiots in UPS shipping and 4 hours of saltwater submersion. . .
Find out about my new childrens book: SS Death Camp Criminal Batallion Go To Monte Carlo For The Massacre
www.pricewatch.com that would be my starting point of preference. Although my own laptop came in around $1900 it probably should have cost in the ballpark of $2600 when I bought it. Company I ended up using was Netlux (www.netlux.com), check them out. Just because it is off brand doesnt make it a bad laptop. Hey, I even got the latest distribution of Gentoo Linux running on it.
Go Illini!!!
There's a company in my area named "JB Data" which has a ton of used UNIX workstation stuff. They also have a lot of laptops, especially the old gray Toshiba ones. I've used laptops as routers, file servers, APRS gateways and other stuff, and those old Toshiba units have been nothing but joy. I've used Sony and IBM equipment, but the Toshibas have been the most durable units I've worked with. My old 410CDT got dropped off of cars, ran over, set on fire (!), and it ran for several years with no problems.
Anyway, this JB Data guy has a big pile of them and PCMCIA ethernet cards to go with them, so I got a few and turned them into routers. They work great. They have a web site at http://www.unixsurplus.com/
-- thalakan
I just had a brainwave. In the past, friends have come to me with their PC woes (I read slashdot right?) My cousin came to me with her dead laptop. It wouldn't boot up and in the end, she bought a brand new one and the old dead one she just left
;) Of course the warning is that at 3yrs old, don't trust the battery much... but you never know, it might run linux =P
Why was her laptop dead? Well, hard drives in laptops die after 2-3 years typically in my experience. Your joe user see's the laptop die and goes to buy a new one since they are beyond warranty. However, techie you could take the laptop (offer money?) change the HD and voila! You have a cool 3yr old laptop to use as a router or firewall or something
Besides that, I've seen MANY older laptops at used computer stores. But I agree that they cost WAY more than their worth. I've seen computers that wouldn't fetch $5 if they included a good monitor go for more than $200 just because they are laptops.
P.S.
Does anyone else miss the trackballs that old laptops used to have?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
Laptops from 3 years ago (say IBM ThinkPad 600E) are holding more value because they are still quite usable. The curve is slowing down, and much of the software of today can be run on this hardware.
But you might consider saving up some cash and getting one of these. They start at $950, and you can get a very well equipped one for only about $1300. That's not a small amount of money, but it is certainly a excellent price/performance ratio.
i'm a bit confused by the given equation:
$ = MHz * 2($/MHz)
$ = 2*$*(MHz/MHz)
$/$ = 2
1 = 2
am i misinterpreting it? if so, i'd appreciate a quick pointer to my mistake.
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
Is there such a thing as a low-end used laptop anymore, and where?
I've got one right here... An old IBM ThinkPad, 486 with 16mb RAM, 250mb HD, runs Debian. Wanna buy?
i've been looking for a cheap thinkpad that'll run win98 and take the internet on the road with me for a while. but i can't find anything worth buying that's under $300.
:(
You want the laptop that I have sitting next to me? It is a CTX EZ Book complete with a 200 MHz Pentium Desktop processor. Yes, you read that correctly: desktop processor. It runs hot as can be and has no battery life to speak of, but my was it cheap to produce!
Posted from the wireless couch.
SURE! Give the geeks a try. I have bought stuff from these guys before and they are great!
= 380Z-2
http://www.compgeeks.com
Here is a nice unit they have right now.
http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid
I managed to find a Dell Latitude LX (486DX/100 16MB 512) for $20. Battery is dead but on old laptops one can replace the cells. It pays to ask arround!
Stupid people stir up a storm of ambivalence within me. Take the above quote. 'Most laptops'...'Auction prices'... 'wholeseller'...'such a thing'. Do you see it? No. Sad.:(
If I had the opportunity to rid the world of one baddie I'd go for the inability of people to separate thinking in terms of a class from thinking in terms of a member of a class. Auction prices (prices plural) and wholeseller imply sets and, in terms of prices, mean averages. 'a thing' implies a one off unit, say a bargin, say something bought or something sold to someone without access to market information and therefore unwilling or unable to establish market value. Either one can post personal ads on the front page of slashdot requesting a bargin or slashdot editors can't grasp something as elementary as distinguishing between a set and an element of a set. Anyway if /. takes personal requests I wanna alot o' freebeer :)
heuristic algorithm seeks stochastic relationship
Newer laptops use standard SODIMMs for RAM
Yes, but if your laptop's SODIMM slot only has enough address lines to see the first 64 MB of a RAM stick, there's no use putting in a 256 MB stick.
cheaply upgradeable hard drives
Some newer ATA hard drives don't work with older BIOSes that can see only the first 8 GB of the hard disk. And you can't just flash your BIOS if your laptop's BIOS publisher has gone out of business.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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?
at least, that's how i got my laptop ... it's a p2/300 compaq armada 7400 that i payed $150 for ... my landlord evicted one of his other tenants for not paying rent for 4 months... this tenant promptly left the country with no forwarding information, and left a bunch of stuff in the apartment ... clothes, some dirty old dishes, and a perfectly good (albeit a little old) computer ... the landlord held the stuff for whatever time they're supposed to, and got no claim on it ... not wanting to throw out a computer, he came to us (i live with 3 other CS geeks), and i picked it up and gave her a home ... i've easily spent the original price again over in new parts (cdrom drive, keyboard), but little Lola's been good to me ... runs debian linux great, and can get close to 3 hours battery life if i'm careful... that is, in console mode running xemacs (which i use to take notes in class) w/o cdrom and nic plugged in... and by the way, does anyone know a good graphical equation editor in linux? it would've made taking notes in probability and physics much easier and more useful ...
09
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).
Ummm. I don't. I mean, I saw some that were ancient and many didn't work on dutch auction at e-bay. But I don't think there really was an $80 golden age.
What I have seen, though:
Before, your basic decent new TFT laptop started well over $1500. Now it's under $1000. I'm sure used prices will be dropping in kind, and I'm quite happy about it.
Not to mention, for your $80 you can get a PDA that's faster and has more RAM than a high-end laptop from 10 years ago.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
"Virtual PC" and "Virtual PC for Windows" are two completely different products sharing the same trademark. The "Virtual PC" product shipped in 1997 is a PC emulator for Macintosh computers that dynamically recompiles (or "code-morphs") Pentium code into PowerPC code and then emulates a vanilla PC motherboard. Bochs is the free equivalent of this product. On the other hand, the "Virtual PC for Windows" product shipped recently is a virtualizer similar to vmware and plex86; its dynamic recompilation engine is much simpler than the Mac version's because it can in many cases just memcpy() the emulated PC's literal binary code and run that.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Check out New Deal Office. It runs on just about any PC and looks pretty cool.
TigerDirect.com has *a lot* of cheap parts and computers, and laptops. Enjoy.
Orange
we don't spam. we do have a box on the front page of our site that allows users to refer someone else to the site, so if you got an email from us it means someone manually typed your name into the box on the front page of the site. If you reply to the message with block in the subject header, no one will ever be able to send you an email from our site again (no front page mail, no mail this story to a friend, no postcards, nothing, period.) I am sorry you got an unwanted email. We have debated removing our mail to a friend links from our site, and everytime I hear that someone is annoyed by an email, its another push in the direction of us doing just that.
yes i run a goth/punk/emo porn site.
I wish I'd had the courage. Be had it running on a couple of lap-tops. Mostly so JLG and Co could do demos. (As opposed to: "Here, let me just set up this computer...."). Bascially their information stated (I'm paraphrasing) "Try it, but it probably won't work and may damage your laptop. If it fails - don't call us. If you got it to work - tell us but we probably won't tell anyone else."
Leave the gun, take the cannoli -- Clemenza, The Godfather
I picked one of those up last year for a song and it runs like a trooper. It is limited, mind you, but for word processing and web surfing, the machine is just great. I can even run graphics layout programs on the thing with little difficulty. Plus, it's one of the last laptops made which uses a track ball; my favorite of all the alternative pointer systems. Those little red rubber dots get so grimy and they hurt after a while. . . Nowhere nearly as fast or precise as a track ball. And those touch pads are just nasty; talk about working your fingers to the bone!
Also, I was happy to discover that the little Dell machine is tough as nails. --Reminds me of a Fisher-Price toy; You can practically drop the thing down the stairs and expect it to still be working when it hits the bottom.
-Fantastic Lad
/. is better than e-bay, I guess.
-m
It's still higher than the price range you wanted, but I picked up a refurbished blueberry ibook for $700. It was in good condition, other than a scratched up (but quite functional) trackpad, and runs Debian GNU/Linux perfectly.
Seems like I remember a time when used laptops were dirt cheap, but I think I might have imagined it.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
I live in Western Massachusetts and there is a shop near UMass Amherst sells p75's occasionally for $99
What kind of drives were these? I'm sitting here right now with a Dell laptop that must be at least 5 years old and is still running strong with the original hard drive (IBM). It has changed owners a couple of times, has run a multitude of different operating systems, and was even a server that was up 24/7 for over a year. All with the original hardware. The hard drives in my desktop are also IBM and I have never had any problems whatsoever.
:-)
I am not claiming that IBM has never made a faulty product, but this brings me to my main point. If you want reliability, stay away from the cutting-edge. I have found that if you always buy slightly behind the times (and research things a bit first, of course) that you can more often than not end up with quality products that will continue to work and be useful for years to come. Not to mention this approach is much cheaper, both in the short term and the long term.
I also find it a bit unsettling that, in general, people consider computers that are only 3 years old to only be useful as routers, firewalls, etc. Especially taking into account some of the wonderful operating systems available that run beautifully on older, slower hardware. I have no doubt that this laptop would completely buckle under the weight of trying to run Windows 2000 or XP (or even applications like Mozilla), but are such things really necessary? Sure we have prettier GUIs, but has our ability to actually do work really improved that much? I am definitely not the norm, but I am perfectly happy and productive at a command-line interface with nothing but the tools that have been around for decades now. I'm well aware that everyone has their own needs, and that some people do indeed require very powerful systems. Still, I can't help but feel that there are a great number of people merely getting caught up in the glitter and glamour of new products. It just seems that an increasingly large part of the population is forgetting just how powerful this "old" hardware/software really is.
I sincerely wish the best of luck to anyone seeking out old hardware/software. If only there were more like you out there. Just try to be wary of sacrificing quality (in new and old products alike) where sacrificing something like speed may suffice.
P.S. My "old" laptop still runs a GUI just fine, it's just not my preference.
A 286 can't run Windows you say?
Then by all means please explain why this is, since my experience must have been a hallucination.
Because ten years ago a buddy of mine gave me an old 286 that he had overclocked to a screaming 18Mhz (as I recall, it was a long time ago), it ran Win 3.1
It may have been slow, but it worked just fine
If it don't GO... chrome it. ~ Frank Banks
In the US, many laptops at or below 1Ghz in speed cost little $1/Mhz NEW. So it is beyond my comprehension why anyone would charge twice that for a used machine.
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.
Don't forget to search eBay by misspelled words -- some eBay sellers are complett idiots!
... 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
$80 seems pretty optimistic for a useful machine.
You can get a IBM ThinkPad Transnote for $800, which seems like a steal to me.
Do you really need a laptop?
Apple Newton Message Pad 2100's and Sonic Blue Revo's seem to be going for $100-150 on eBay.
I don't know where you are, geographically speaking, but I ran across a guy at the 23 Feb TRW Ham Radio swap meet in Los Angeles who refurbishes and sells old laptops. He had five or six different kinds of Toshibas and IBMs at his booth. I didn't try any out functionally, but they all looked near-new cosmetically. We're talking something like 10" diagonal screen, 166MHz, 32M of RAM, etc. for $200 to $300. I haven't actually dealt with him so I have no idea about his reputability, but he seemed like a nice enough middle-aged guy, possibly a retired engineer or something from the aerospace industry. All I know is: His name is Walt. His phone number is (310)375-3498 Good luck!
http://www.acinc.com
"How would this sentence be different if pi equaled 3?"
You havea 701C with a working active matrix LCD? I would probably be willing to pay $200 for that. I used to carry mine around with me everywhere. Had a great battery and none of those pesky peripherals built in. Used it for notes mostly. The outer cover of the LCD is notoriously flimsy.
Ironically, the LCD was killed while it was safely stored in a padded laptop bag. Not sure how it happened, but the next time I opened it up, I found that the LCD had leaked its bodily fluids.
I sold mine for $140 on Ebay, clearly noting the status of the LCD. I'd say the $200 range would be a fair price for a working one with all standard peripherals and cables included. So, that's about 2*MHz, but my PII-233 (OCed to 300) with maxed out RAM, 24x CD-R and 6GB Travelstar would barely fetch 1.25*(natural)MHz.
I think that's more an apples to oranges comparison anyway, as one is a collectible (in my mind) and the other is not. Maybe the author is only looking at the lastest and greatest (PIII + Celeron, TFT active matrix) used laptops, which might make a closer fit to Cost = 2*MHz.
Give them an inch and they'll take a foot. Much more than that, you won't have a leg to stand on.
I just finished a transaction on ebay for a craptop (= second, low-end laptop to run linux for email/web/mp3s). i did a fair share of hunting around newsgroups, craigslist, etc. and this was the best deal i found by far. generally, the prices were around $1.50/MHz for working laptops everywhere i looked.
.... can't beat those!
the specs are 90MHz Pentium, 11" screen, 72 MB Ram, sound. no cd-rom, no ethernet, no modem. no idea if the battery works (haven't actually received the laptop yet); not too important for me, tho.
i think the problem is that midrange laptops (166-400) are still quite usable and more efficient than newer ones, so there's still high demand for them. and many folks have the same idea i do for craptops.
the high prices just reflect the laws of economics
why not pick up a Mako for 150, or a Clie with a keyboard and cord to connect to your cell?
What do you really need to do on your machine that you can't do remotely on another one?
The ______ Agenda
My dad bought a toshiba a few years ago from them, and just last week got a thinkpad 600e for $600.
cheapist one: Compaq 120mmx/16ram/1.2g for $179
http://www.truedataproducts.com/laptops.htm
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
Retrobox is a site that specializes in selling used equipment. Their prices are pretty good in general and sometimes you can find some really great deals.
P.S. Click on the "Search" icon.
I've got a zenith zwl 183-92 sitting on the desk on my shelf. My highschool drama teacher gave it to me (he wrote his master thesis on it sometime in the late 80's). It's a 4 MHz monster with 10 megs of disk space and a 720K floppy drive. I had intentions of trying to get it onto my university's network, but I've no idea how to go about doing that - anyone have an external NIC that can plug into a paralell port...I thought not.
The major kickass thing about it is that I learned how to use edlin!
The battery lasts 15 minutes on an 8 hour charge - now there's efficiency for you!
Insanity is contagious. - Yossarian
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.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
My girlfriend had a 486 laptop which I was going to use myself to make notes and do some programming(not compiling) whilst I was at university and travelling. Her mother had a garage sale and she thought this old thing is useless and so she sold the laptop, case, disks, and power supply all for $2 AUD!!!! I would have paid 5 times as much just to stop her from selling.
Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
Sounds like a personal ad... hmmmm... slashdot personals... could be real good or REAL scary.
My dad got me a sweet little P166 notebook for my graduation gift. In fact, I'm using it right now. It appears a friend of his was buying old notebooks from Irving Oil and re-selling them in our area. He even knocked 100$ off the price cause I upgraded one of his other machines to Win98. I'm currently running Internet Connection Sharing through my desktop machine upstairs so I can IRC, email and /. from bed. So I recommend looking for companies dumping their old machines.
I got a refurbished gateway at Gateway Country, 700mhz for $550.
On one hand it needs a network adapter, memory, and HD upgrade. But on the otherhand, the case and keyboard are new and the monitor doesn't have any bad pixels and theres a 1 year warranty.
I live in Toronto, Ontario, and I just purchased a laptop for $80 CDN, for which I received a Toshiba Satellite Pro 410CDT. This is a Pentium 90, with 16 MB of RAM, a 2 GB hard drive, and a 800x600 TFT display. It also came with a PCMCIA 28.8 modem (now flashed to 36.6), an internal CD-ROM, and an external floppy. The battery even works; it'll run for three hours off it! I am pretty damn pleased with it, especially considering how well-documented Toshiba's old laptops are...there are some problems, like I need to replace a fan in it, and the retention mechanism for the CD-ROM seems to be really bent up (the drive still fits in there snugly, but I can't lock it in place), but hey, it works. Now I can do homework wherever the hell I want! (And play Quake after)
About 4 months ago, I shopped around for a laptop for school. I just needed it for note-taking, although I wanted something with enough power to run a GUI.
I eventually found a laptop at http://www.compgeeks.com . It's a P166 MMX, not in perfect shape, but it came with docking bay and unguaranteed battery for $180.
Your best bet to find a cheap laptop is to hit reseller shops on the web. eBay is a lot more hit and miss - sometimes you'll find a great deal, most of the time, they'll suck.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
shoot, I play on selling my laptop on ebay soon. :)
PIII 700
128 ram
geforce2 (yep you heard right)
20 gig hard drive
cdrw/dvd combo drive
2 li-ion battarys
15 uxga screen
had it like 7 months, and I am hoping to pull like 2 grand for it.
And this is for a used laptop
I don't know if this is funny or not, but after a few beers, anything is.
guvf vf zl fvt
Real easy to come by, and cheap to! Word of advice tho - don't call the manufacturer for ANY reason, ok? They're, umm, special OEM deals.
Here's the link:
www.igotmylaptopoffthebackofatruck.com
Enjoy!
Derek
I'm telling you, that's where it's to be found if you're looking for a good cheap laptop.
My dad, always on the prowl for computer hardware for me, had a guy at his office who needed to pay off his CC bill. So he then gave my dad specs on the laptop I'm typing this up on - Toshiba PIII-800, DVD, Good battery, case, cables and some other various accessories. He wanted $650 for it, so I waited a week and sure enough he told my dad that he would accept $600 for it, and when my dad went in the next day he offered $550 and the dude accepted the offer. So I got a damn nice laptop, and for hella cheap too (It was only $150 more than what I got for my last laptop when I got the new one - A dell PII-266)
Kris
botboy60@hotmail.com
Nerdnetwork.net
Look, laws are written so that if you put something under your shirt and even move towards the door, you are guilty of shoplifting. Period.
I've watched a security guard run out the door, throw her badge at one kid, deck the other kid, and cuff them for grabbing some shoes and running. They weren't the only ones surprised.
What you are repeating is simply a myth. Do you HONESTLY think that merchants would simply ignore a problem once someone 'makes it off the curb' ?
Not only are you not a lawyer, you don't even bother to watch TLC or any other show that has even FEATURED stuff on shoplifting or other petty crimes.
Wow. If ignorance is not only bliss, you must be *insert high object here*
as a funny sidenote, I followed your link (who doesn't love cheap hardware??) While browsing the CPU section, I came across an AMD K6-2 450 with the little blurb next to it reading "One of the industries hottest processors..."
Now THAT'S comedy!
p.s. - I have a K6-2 450, and I love it...
do not read this line twice.
I picked up a Panasonic CF41 laptop off ebay for £10 quid. Problem I'm having is everything for it is proprietry. Ram is rare and expensive, I managed to hunt down an 8meg module for $25 quid. Battery is dead (of course). Power supply has a funny connector, I either hack it, or buy an overpriced ac adapter. The floppy drive was missing and seem to go for £100 second hand! The built in CD drive appears to be pre ide, and doesn't seem to work with Linux. Thank god they had agreed on PCMCIA back then. At least these days we have standard sodimms and stuff.
I'm quite happy with a NEC MobilePro 800 I have. People come up to me when I'm using it and ask what it is and where they can get such a sweet looking sub-notebook. Most of them are sad when I tell them it won't run Microsoft Windows (it has a MIPS R4000 processor).
However, if you're not shy about installing UNIX and compiling programs from source, you definitely want to check it out. All you'll need is a CompactFlash disk (I recommend the IBM 1GB Microdrive), so that you can fit your OS of choice. (I'm using NetBSD, but I hear Linux works, too. NetBSD has a very nice package management system called pkgsrc.)
Don't get me wrong; a souped-up WinCE device is definitely not ideal for everyone. They're not fast and have miniscule memory, but they should be relatively cheap, even new. (There should be many good deals popping up now that Microsoft is discontinuing its MIPS port of WinCE). I know that Alan Computech has the MobilePro 880 for $490 new. I'm sure you can find much better if you look around.
Here's the specs for the MobilePro 880 (which is slightly faster than the 800 which I have):
The skinny: I'm very happy with my "laptop". Everything I want to run is open source, so I'm not tied to the x86 architecture.
Ben
I've had BeOS running fine on my laptop. Well, almost fine, it wouldn't recognize the mobile S3 Virge in there, but I got a nice driver somewhere that allowed it to do 800x600 and 16-bit color, but slowly. The card does have no 3D support, I've had 3DMark 99 tell me that.
Picked right up on my Yamaha 715 sound, and 3Com something-or-other 10bT pcmcia card. Started and shut down nice and fast, faster than any Windows or Linux I threw at it.
Of course, then there was application availability, but I'm pretty sure that's been talked to death.
Since It's a laptop you might just have it open on your lap.
Leave the gun, take the cannoli -- Clemenza, The Godfather
>>" How about my motorcycle?"
>The one from StreetHawk?
The one from SeaQuest DSV, only blue.
With the 365X/XD, there is a known issue with the video that does not allow you to go back and forth between XWindow and Console mode. You leave XWindow and the Console is hopelessly garbled. Only the Three Fingered Salute fixes this problem. I tried deassimilating my 365X and am so frustrated with the result I'm going to nuke and pave it and reinstall Windows95a with all fixes on it.
That having been said, newer Thinkpads (post-MWave) are absolutely awesome Linux laptops. In fact, if you ask IBM nicely I believe they will preload Linux on a new Thinkpad.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Sounds like the exact opposite of Future Shop. I bought a pretty decent two-line cordless phone (~$300), with the extended warranty (3 years). They only had the display model, but they said when the New Store Opened in four months, I could exchange it. New store opens, I take it in, and they said "Oh, we can't do that. Sorry." Portents of things to come.
After about a year, the thing starting randomly dying, and consistently when the antenna was pushed in. Push it in, power goes off, pull it out, it powers up again. I took it back, and found out they had changed their policy - now they had to get it fixed 3 times before they'd exchange it. OK, so I put it in for repairs. They won't give me a spare phone, but they say that if I buy one I can take it back when my phone's ready.
I bought the cheapest POS cordless they had (it sucked), and after two weeks, my phone's ready. I take it home, push in the antenna, and it dies. Next day, I take it back. The moron at the returns desk tries to convince me that it's something else - maybe the battery's dead. I tell her I don't think that's the problem, and she gets all huffy, and writes on the form "Customer claims it isn't the battery." Nice. So I get it "fixed" a second time. Get it home, and it worked for about 5 hours before it bombed out again. I didn't have time to screw around with it, so I just left it in the box for a while.
Eventually, I get around to taking it back. Third time, no go, so I take it in for the last time. To be able to exchange it, you need the original receipt (which I had), the original box (beat up, but I had it), and every single return form from each attempted repair (which they never gave me). "Oh, I'm sorry, but we can't accept any returns without the repair forms." Great, except you have them. It wasn't even worth it to try and deal with these idiots, so I just left.
I'll never shop at Future Shop again though.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
I still use mine, and a friend (who bought one on my recommendation from ebay last year) does too. It's all in what you want to do. Buy one on ebay with a keyboard, slap in an old megahertz/3com modem or 10bt nic, and away you go. Surf the web (I recommend Newt's Cape), download for viewing later. Use the keyboard and type notes, documents, etc into either Notepad or NewtWorks (NewtWorks was part of the premium bundle that you could buy separately). Check email. Read Usenet.
Granted, it's not going to be screamingly fast, but I promise that you can't type faster than it can display. It's all in what you want to do with it. Mine works as my ultimate notepad, PDA, web browser, and newsreader. I've used it on 2-week-long trips away from the office where it worked out better than my laptop. And on ebay you can probably get it for 200-300$.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Doesn't it just piss you off about BeOS?
Given the off topic mod it appears not only are /. editors too stupid to tell class from a member of a class but the moderators they empower are too stupid to distinguish off topic from unaligned material... you're a bigot sad but very very true :(
heuristic algorithm seeks stochastic relationship
Red Hat runs like sh*t on my Athlon 800/20gb desktop too; what's your point? Try Debian. I've got Debian and Win95 double-booted on a used IBM ThinkPad 755CD that I picked up for $300 on E-Bay. Don't have modem and sound because IBM hasn't written drivers for my model(yet), but XWindows works pretty as you please.