decent used laptops

I buy old laptops on E-Bay and refurbish them for resale, a few dozen per year. From your description, however, you professor friend should buy new. I just sold a couple of nice Pentium III laptops from 2002 (Toshiba 2805's), and they went for almost $200. But in my view, they are still too old to run most "current applications", and at $200 for those, a new laptop makes more sense than a used one. In July I bought a brand new Gateway MT6711 at Best Buy for $499, no rebates, straight out deal. This is a dual core Pentium laptop with a 15" widescreen display, a 160GB hard drive, a dual layer DVD burner and a Gigabyte of memory, with Vista Home Premium. There are a LOT of very good laptop deals this week. I think that the deals available for $499 to $649 are good enough to make buying an older used laptop not worthwhile in terms of value. I don't know for sure what he had in mind price wise, but he can get a pretty nice new machine for about $500, and anything that "will run current applications" in a way that you would want to run them will probably be $300-$350 or more for a used machine. A machine with no warranty and unknown history. Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2007 16:59:20 -0700 From: "Zane H. Healy" <healyzh at aracnet.com> Subject: Re: decent used laptops To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Message-ID: &lt;p0624083ec31f49e8d526(a)[192.168.1.199]&gt; Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" At 4:00 PM -0700 9/25/07, David Griffith wrote: