Why Buy a Used Laptop and not a New One?

What’s the big thing about having a laptop computer? Nothing anymore since they are about “a dime a dozen”. If you want to buy a laptop, what are your plans for your laptop? What do you need your laptop for? Will you use it for any of the things mentioned below?

• Writing and printing research papers and reports
  Making office spreadsheets
  Preparing slideshow presentations
  Playing low graphic games
  Downloading and playing small video and MP3 files
  Watching DVD movies and videos
  Burning files to CDs
  Tweaking with digital camera photos
  Keeping basic financial records
  Operating a small business
  A dozen other uses!

Then you might want to consider buying a refurbished or used laptop. Most of these used laptops easily perform the aforementioned tasks for you. You can run current applications on refurbished laptops same as if you were using a brand new laptop.

Why? Because most software publishers cannot keep up with the speed of technological advancements in laptop hardware. So current software can run on a laptop or even desktop PC that is 4X slower than the fastest laptops available. And most of the current software can run very smoothly on these slower computers.

That means you don’t have to spend $1500 or more on the best laptop available in the market. Based on your need for a laptop, you can buy one for as low as $250. For the majority of people, a $250 used laptop is enough to perform all the necessary tasks they are doing. However, if you need to burn CDs, watch DVD movies, or play games, expect to spend anywhere from $400 to $850 for your used laptop.

There are times that a manufacturer will offer a brand new laptop for a cheap price, say $650. Then you find yourself in a dilemma if you buy that brand new laptop or a used laptop that could be for almost the same price. Take note that this is just a marketing ploy of manufacturers to lure people into buying their computers or laptops. However, if you buy the new cheap laptop, you will usually have to customize the supposed $650 laptop. Then, after customization, you discover that your laptop cost much more than $650! Even if there is a mall in rebate for this purchase, you cannot buy the laptop for $650! Clever yet effective. Thus it is still much better to buy a refurbished laptop for more or less the same price.

In a nutshell, these are the things to expect from a refurbished laptop.

a) Easy completion of basic tasks necessary to everyday users.
b) Buying a home user laptop at 50% of the original cost.
c) Buying a business laptop for up to 20% of the original cost.
d) Established technology that will last for many years
e) Available parts for laptop problems
f) Great savings

Also, used or refurbished laptops are not low end home user laptops. Some of the laptops you can buy as refurbished are Dell Inspiron, Compaq Presario, Sony Vaio, HP Pavilion, and Toshiba Satellite. If you buy these as brand new, you could be spending two or three thousand dollars or more, quite easily.

Used business laptops like Compaq Armada and Dell Latitude have available spare parts even though their warranty has long expired. Compared to home user based laptops, business laptops have longer warranty periods. And believe it or not, these laptops work well beyond their warranty period.

In case your business laptop, new or used, has defective spare parts after the warranty periods, then you can get spare parts for them as these laptops are proven to work for long periods. And though the models change, the spare parts usually do not. And since business laptops are leased to corporations, manufacturers keep a lot of spare parts so that the corporations’ businesses will not be crippled.

Due to the stability of these business laptops, these are more expensive than the home laptops, which are more fragile, have no spare parts, and last only until the warranty period. Some of these business laptops fetch a price as high as $3200, and the cheapest laptops available run for about $2000.

If you buy a refurbished version of these business laptops, you can buy one that is priced from $250 to about $900 at the most. That translates into big savings over the original cost!