9 years ago I bought a Toshiba Satellite laptop and was using it until early last year when I upgraded and the old laptop became the “family laptop”. With power problems, the laptop eventually died last week, so, just like my Nokia 5800 mobile, I looked to eBay for a replacement. New laptops are £350+ if you buy new from PC World etc. You can get cheaper but they are lower spec and not worth the money.
I was looking for a cheap one and was surprised at how many “crap” laptops were selling for £120+. They’d all start at around £60 but by the end of the auction it would be £130. At those rates I’d prefer to buy a new one – I was looking for something cheap and cheerful at around £70 to last for 6 to 12 months. Eventually I found one with a buy-it-now price of £79 – with a missing key on the keyboard but for what it’d be used for it would do the job and the buy-it-now ensured it wouldnt rise in price to the £130 levels
Applying all the updates to WinXP Pro highlighted the fact that the installed OS wasnt genuine. I thought “Argh, ebay is well known for dodgy, hooky stuff” but then with my technical knowledge realised that the licence key used to install it might not be the same as the certificate of authenticity on the base of the laptop. Thankfully it wasnt and updating the key to match what was on the base of the laptop has got me a working, legitimate system. Albeit it had Office 2003 installed too which wasnt legitimate and so got removed but for £80 its not a bad little unit and only a little more expensive than fixing the Tosh
Just call me Mr Thrifty 🙂