Watch for manufacturer's Ebay stores for notebooks
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| tuxchick Oct 30, 2005 10:39 AM EDT |
IBM used to have an official store on Ebay, but it seems to have gone away, which is too bad, because you could get great buys on last year's brand-new models. Full 3-year warranties and everything. Last time I checked there were other manufacturer stores, so check 'em out. Also, remember that all sellers are rated by buyers, so check those ratings! And be crystal-clear on return policies. It's easy to avoid Ebay troubles if you do a tiny bit of homework. And yes, watch out for high shipping costs- many sellers inflate them. I don't buy from them, unless the total price is so low it makes it a good deal overall. |
| tadelste Oct 30, 2005 11:09 AM EDT |
tuxchick: great advice. Also, some sellers are consigned to dump end of life prodcuts. They also have some good deals. |
| jimf Oct 30, 2005 11:28 AM EDT |
tuxchick, For those of us who are pinching pennies, IBM still has used/refurbished laptops on the IBM site here: http://www-132.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDis... Prices and warranties are pretty good on some of these. A friend of mine was very happy with his purchase there. Thinkpad's are really the crem de la crem in laptops. |
| tadelste Oct 30, 2005 1:16 PM EDT |
Jim, Those are great prices and excellent notebooks. My industry contacts tell me that prices on notebooks will fall as much as 80% in the near future. I have a Thinkpad T21 and I'll stay with that until prices on the new ones come down and I see a need for another. You're right though. Those IBM notebooks at the other end of your link are excellent for anyone needing one now. Thanks for sharing that information. |
| TxtEdMacs Oct 30, 2005 3:03 PM EDT |
Glad you like IBM, but my T-30 was a disappointment from the start. Though it became much nicer unit with Fedora Core 3. |
| jimf Oct 30, 2005 5:14 PM EDT |
TxtEdMacs, Strange, cause my friend's was a T-30 which was running perfectly under straight Debian. He was happy as a clam with it. What were you trying to run prior to Red Hat? |
| bstadil Oct 30, 2005 10:20 PM EDT |
December is actually a good month to buy laptops, at least in the US, if you don't mind waiting for rebates.
Go to
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/categories.php?catid=18
and fill out a Topic Alert for the one you are looking for. |
| TxtEdMacs Oct 31, 2005 7:15 AM EDT |
jimf - Mandrake 9.1 Pro was a disaster. However, my problems with the T-30 were not limited to software installations. The case developed two cracks, on a unit that saw very little abuse! It was also over priced for the feature set, and under speced, for IBM quality? |
| TxtEdMacs Oct 31, 2005 3:29 PM EDT |
Interesting business news: Dell having problems though their desktop sales are down the laptops are up. Really? Quoting:"They were seeing some weakness in desktop and strength in notebooks, but not enough to offset the weakness in desktop," said analyst Shaw Wu of American Technology Research. "Dell's problem is that it's not differentiated enough" from competitors. Dell is not differentiated enough? Well from my reading they have been making a play for high end game machines, moving up the server scale and copying everyone else's goodies only cheaper. Perhaps they need to borrow some MS marketing types and talk about how innovated they have become. Or they might consider adding AMD 64 2X that out perform their Intel offerings at a lower price and lower power consumption. They might consider being the first to offer Linux on the desktop to a wider range of their product line and actually draw more buyers by having those units priced under the Windows units. Or more likely say they are considering such actions while sticking with Intel and Windows - now that's innovation! |
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