Why spend money on a refurbed laptop on EBay when you can go do Dell.com and get a laptop with a multiyear warranty, from a place you KNOW is going to be around. A warranty is only good as long as the company is in business.
“I can get a good look at a T-bone by sticking my head up a bull’s ***, but I’d rather take the butcher’s word for it” - Tommy Boy
Dell has some pretty cheap laptops and PCs. Go there.
BTW… I build and fix computers all the time. It’s my job, not a hobby. Good luck.
Kevin
Thanks guys, I am now typing on a brand new Acer, purchased a Compusa. With the extended warranty it was a little more than I had planned but it is a great computer for the price with a good service plan and I know where to go if something was to go wrong. Thanks for all the input.
Regards
Randy
I got my refurb at Micro Center. I have been dealing with them for 15 years and never a problem yet. And they have (wait for it) on site tech support for anything they sell.
Bought a refurbished HP for my daughter to take away to college. For $475 From Fry’s. Haven’t had a single problem with it. Other than when we hooked the university’s ethernet up to it, the machine was immediately infected with some kind of virus that I spent the rest of the day fighting it off. Not HP’s fault that I lost a whole day…
Had some bad luck with a refurb from dell. Several I/O ports failed to function. Lost the hard drive about three months later. The real kicker is that this was a factory aproved refurb. Only by refurb from…I dunno…H.P. They probally make the best quality product.
University networks are always under attack in a variety of ways. I consider them wide open and unsafe.
You probably can walk into any university computers common to the student body and sit down. Open the history and simply go to the pages that are opened by the people before you that day. The computer itself probably will be infected in some way.
Amd what ever you do, don’t copy a file from that infected computer to a floppie and take it home and put the floppie into your PC at home. Chances are you’ll infect your home PC. Use wireless with WEB enabled at the University, if you can. Be sure to have virus protection installed. McAfee has saved me many times from trash email. Also, always view your email as regular text, not as a web page or HTML. Viruses can be passed easily within HTML. Always use normal text.[2c]
Also if you are using wireless lock it down.
A friend of mine war drove my town of 10,000 for 2 hours recently.
Results in 90 Wireless points. 40 of which is properly secured and unuseable. of the 50 left 12 had 54 Mb service. They were NOT locked. You can piggy back easily onto that person’s unsecure wireless conncection.
I am going FTTH and by passing wireless completely. It should be lit within a year.
The old saying, buyer beware, myself would not buy from ebay.
If you look hard enough and not in hurry to buy one, the prices for a new laptop pc’s are coming down and depending what features most likely get good deal.
If you go to best buy, staples, office max, etc, can see them and how the keyboard feels.
Also get the latest anti viruis, spam, etc to protect from being affected.