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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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
If your users have a 17" screen and a 10" package, nobody will care if they look like the Borg :D
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
You can't actually force someone to come back inside, anyway. Once they step off the curb, you can't keep them there. You can try to talk them into coming inside, or write down their license tag (if they're dumb enough to get in their car with you watching), but you can't make them go back in the store. Also, remember that they haven't actually stolen anything until they go through the door, even if they put something under their shirt.
So, you have a short distance, from the door to the curb, in which to stop someone.
When I worked at Target (way back in college), we used the walkie talkies to tell some employees to go stand right outside the door. That way, the person can't get away.
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.
TigerDirect.com has *a lot* of cheap parts and computers, and laptops. Enjoy.
Orange
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?"
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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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
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