If you’re a college student and you don’t have a lot of money to burn on your next laptop, or if you’re a working Joe, living check to check and you simply need a new rig, don’t be afraid of getting yourself a refurbished laptop.
You’ll hear a lot of stories of getting a new refurbished laptop home and finding it’s absolutely loaded with viruses, half of the components barely work, a keyboard sticks, the screen has a crack in it, and so on, and while it’s certainly easy to spend good money on a piece of junk, that’s not the case if you know what to look for.
Before you start, you should have a rough idea in mind of what, exactly, you need from your laptop. If you just need a simple rig to do homework on (and maybe play a few older games when you need a break), you have a lot of options, and can basically afford to go as cheap as you want. If you need it for, say, multimedia reasons such as editing video, mixing sound, or if you need a good, cheap gaming rig, you’ll have to get a more precise idea of what you need in mind.
Either way, don’t expect to be able to find exactly what you need, but rather, more of a rough approximation of it. If you’re a gamer, and you can score a laptop with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2 Gigs of RAM for a few hundred less than a laptop from Alienware, but… the graphics card happens to be outdated, just buy the thing already, and upgrade the graphics card later. You’ll still be saving cash.
More importantly, though, you should make sure that that great deal you’re getting actually is a great deal. If you can’t even get the thing to turn on, if the screen acts funny, if it makes a loud grinding sound every time you put a disc in, you probably don’t want it. So whenever possible, make sure you give the laptop a test-run before putting any of your hard earned money down.
That’s not always a possibility, of course. In fact, if you buy online, you’re going to be able to shop around for the best deals, but you certainly can’t test drive anything. If that’s the case, you’ll want to make sure you’re buying from a reliable vendor.
So in short, you actually can get an awesome laptop at a lower cost, but you’ll want to be careful. Know what you need, know what you’re getting, and know how much it’s worth.
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“and upgrade the graphics card later”… nice one
Good luck on upgrading that graphics card