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Pointers on buying a second hand laptop?


ticktock

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Hey all, I recently received christmas money and have just gathered enough cash to buy a laptop. I managed to find a 2nd hand Asus x5se laptop, it has very good specs and has had its memory upgraded from the standard 2 gb to 4gb and includes a brand new battery that the previous owner bought.

 

Anyways, I am kinda skeptic on how to check up on how good the laptop is, I mean I can easily check the specs by running cpuz or gpuz or speccy but how can I check some of the other issues on the laptop I don't know about? Maybe the seller is selling the laptop as it having no hidden defects, wherein fact there maybe, and I just don't know of it yet since I don't know how to check up on it.

 

So I ask what do I check upon seeing the laptop, any programs I should run, algorithms? any nook and crannies I should look upon the exterior and interior of the laptop to make sure I'm getting my money's worth? I would also like to know how can I detect how old the OS has been installed on the machine or maybe how old the machine is overall, irregardless of the number of times it was formatted.

 

Please help.

 

Thank you :)

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you can check the age by the model number or pull out the hard drive and check the mfg date which will give you a rough idea. for 2nd hand the only problem i've come across the the keyboard going bad and hard drives of which on my dell laptops i have replaced only after 2 years.

 

 

potential issues usually include screen going bad and latches breaking but other than that the board and cpu isn't going to go bad very easily.

Edited by hornybluecow

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If he will let you run any programs on it you can run the normal burn-in test programs.. Memtest.. Sisoft Sandra has (Or used to have) a bunch of Hard Drive / memory / CPU burn in tests..

 

Just run them and see if it crashes lol!

 

Just a personal recommendation I would reformat the Laptop once you got it and start from scratch..

 

Though Make sure you right down a list of the Drivers and Possibly download the updated drivers before and and burn them to CD.

 

To test the LCD Screen I would probably open up MS Paint maybe Internet Explorer.. before IE loads anything hit the Stop Button and it show show a Blank White Page.

Press F11 to go full screen so the screen should be all White.

 

From here you just check for Pink Dots/Pixels.. I am not actually sure what color they are but you can tell because its not white.

That will tell/show you if you have any dead pixels on the screen.

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Hey thanks for the reply! By running those programs and algorithms, what would I be checking? the capacity of load that the machine can carry or just some benchmark results for its current specs?

 

thanks for the tip on the lcd screen!

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You know, I don't know what the specs are of this used computer your looking at..

 

But 500 bucks you can get a decent Dell or HP.

 

Heck I seen a pretty nice ASUS Laptop the other day at Best Buy for $499

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