Refurbished laptops
 

I am looking at perhaps purchasing a laptop computer for my daughter for christmas. I wonder if any of you have had any experience (good or bad) with a refurbished laptop. There are tons of Dell laptops out there which are "off lease" for around $250 with anywhere from a 30 to 60 day warranty. Most do not warrant the battery, but a new battery can be purchased for about $40 on Ebay. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

For $500-600 you can get a pretty nice brand new one with a full years warranty and not have to worry about how it has been treated in the past.

I hear you, but money is tight and $250-$300 would be all I could spend.

I hear yeah. My wife has had 2 of them so far from DELL. The first one had HORRIBLE battery life, but the second one has been pretty good. Both of them have broken where the screen hinges hook into the actual computer part by the keyboards and it causes the screen to get real loose and floppy.

I say monitor http://slickdeals.net/ or Dell's outlet.

There are some pretty good deals on slickdeals periodically.

Use http://www.dealcatcher.com/ and go to the right hand side under "deal alerts" put in dell laptop and it will notify you of any good bargains.

I got this one today. Don't know to much but it is a Duo Core and I think Core 2 Duo is suppose to be better. but for $399 cant be to bad

Good Luck

https://webmail.east.cox.net/do/redi...0gb-dvd-burner

What will she be using it for? If it is just going to surf the net, use office, email, etc then I would look at a netbook. I just picked up a sweet Asus for $325 brand new. Only thing it is missing is a DVD/CD player which I added for $50 more as an external for the few times I use it. You can spend anywhere from $250 to $450 on one and they will do most tasks she will probably need them for.

-Svence

Or just go with a deal like this.

http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/hot-deals/972782/

Shortstory is Intel® Pentium® Dual Core T4300 (2.1GHz/800Mhz FSB/1MB cache)
Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium, 64bit, English
Microsoft® Works 9
1 Yr Ltd Hardware Warranty, InHome Service after Remote Diagnosis - Important Information
McAfee SecurityCenter, 15-Months
3GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 at 800MHz
250GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM)
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X4500HD
6-cell battery
Dell Wireless 1397 802.11g Half Mini-Card
Integrated 1.3 MP Webcam
High Definition Audio 2.0
Jet Black

for around $400+Tax. Bing is doing 20% cashback on all Dell.com purchases and Dell has free shipping until 2010.



----Whoops, never really addressed your refurb Q. I buy a lot of things refurbed but laptops wouldn't be one of them. They will never have the power or battery life (I know it may be a NEW battery purchased seperately) as something that is new. Laptops just seem to fade as life goes on, it's probably a result of a couple of years being carried around, bumped, dropped, etc etc etc.

-Svence

One more and I'll stop...

http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/hot-deals/971978/

$360+tax shipped

-Svence

i have purchased 2 laptops and one desktop from dell refurbished .. some even have the warranty left from when new .. excellent customer service, very happy with product. most of all, substantial savings.

just my experience.

dell is the number 3 laptop behind hp and acer and refurb is as new. you cant go wrong and their customer service is as good or as bad as any other. buy with the knowlege that you are getting a good product.

Just my two cents, but here at work, the IT department got a good dealon HP laptops.
They had so much trouble with them that they refused to buy any more
and have switched back to DELL.
Every laptop I have had has been a DELL and there have been no issues,
I use them till they are off the lease which takes about 5 -7 years.
The only thing I had to do was spec them at the high end of teh tech range so
they do not become outdated too quick.
What the IT department has found is that any of teh laptops that come back to them as DOA,
are usually because of virus downloads by people not being careful
or actual physical damage because of people being careless.
But the HP's always seam to burn themselves up, I used one as a loner one time
and you could smell that distinct aroma of hot electronics and the performace just was not up to par with teh DELL.

i would never say buy a laptop refurbed. you could have bought one on black friday from best buy or walmart for $197 new. as for Dell we had dell and nothing but problems so we went back to IBM thinkpads here at work. Steer clear of HP or Compaq. Asus which was mentioned makes really good mother boards not sure of there Displays but good mother boards. the true leader in laptops is Toshiba.

Thinkpads are in my opinion the holy grail of laptops, in fact the IBM towers are pretty damn impressive as well. The laptops are built like brick houses, heavy, but run hard and run long...I guess that's why they cost more.

-Svence