What are the minimum requirements I should look for in buying a used laptop?
September 17th, 2009 | 
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I am a college student, and I need it for mainly for school BUT I would also like to use it to surf the web and maybe download music and burn cds.
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These days, you can get very decent new laptops for the 499 – 600 dollar range. I’m not sure I would recommend buying a used laptop at all.
However, if you do buy a used laptop… Get the fastest processor you can find for the price range you’re looking at. I wouldn’t recommend going down to a pentium III for instance. Stick with pentium 4, pentium M or better. For AMD go with an athlon 64 or turion.
Make certain the laptop has enough memory. This is where used laptops almost always fall short. Try for at least 512mb RAM.
You’ll probably want to have a wifi card in the laptop, being a student. If it doesn’t have one built in, you’ll have to plunk down more money to buy an external device, so consider that when looking at price.
If you’re not doing any gaming, you won’t have to worry too much about the video card.
For a hard drive… it depends on how much space you think you’ll need. Used, I wouldn’t go below 40gig.
Still, I highly recommend looking into low cost new laptops. Used laptops can have a LOT of problems.
3.4GHz Pentium 4 650 w/ HT Technology, 1GB DDR2, 100GB, DVD?RW
make sure it has at-least 512MB ram
Well, you are going to have to tell us what you are going to school for.
Just saying you are using it for school does not tell us anything.
You could be going for graphic design, Architectural design, computer programming or any other career that requires a fast computer and we wouldn’t know.
Minimum requirements to burn a cd…
would be a Cd-rom with CD-R capabilities.
…other than that…
the standard Specs that laptops nowadays comes out with, should be more than enough for school work and surfing the web.
Hard-drive size (if you are downloading music…the larger the harddrive the better)
Processor (intel is usually best, dual-core is the new thing) – bigger the better, compare the used model to what is being sold new
USB ports (you’ll definitely need them)
Wireless (really helpful for using free library internet etc. while studying or surfing)
ability to run Windows XP (Vista is nice but so new there are bound to be bugs…so if you can run XP, all your software should work)
lets see, I’d want a widescreen, preferably a 12.1 or a 14.1 inch.
I’d want USB 2.0, a minimum of 1280×768 (wxga) screen resolution.
wireless b/g, 1 gig of ram, a mobile processor of 1.2 ghz or higher.
minimum 40 gig hard drive. cd is optional, I can always plug in a usb 2.0 cdrw or dvdrw
Here’s what you should look for (if looking for a Windows laptop):
- 512 MB-1 GB RAM
- 80-180 GB HD
- 1.5 Ghz-3.0 Ghz Intel processor
- 128 MB VRAM- 512 MB VRAM
- CD-RW/DVD-RW (24x/8x speed) disc drive (you can have an optional floppy)
- Windows 2000/XP/Vista packaged and/or installed
-14" LCD screen
-WIFI card
- Wireless mouse
If you’re looking into Macs, however, try these models:
-iBook G4 12"
- iBook G4 14"
- Macbook w/ 2 GB RAM, 120GB HD, wireless Mighty Mouse (you should wait until Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard comes out before buying this, though.)
Personally, I would go with the Macbook.
Good luck.
Check out this link and see for yourself.
http://www.dell.com/content/products/category.aspx/notebooks?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs
I have a Dell XPS M1710 that I’ve had for about 3yrs. I play games and do work on it. It was probably the best investment I made in Electronics. I would definitley look into buying New & not used you will never regret going new but if you buy someone’s headache you will kick yourself for saving a couple of bucks.You also have the option for a warranty with a new Pc but not so with used Pc’s. These are probably the most affordable andd versatile Pc’s around. Even if you don’t buy one of these at least you will have more knowledge as to what to search for and how to compare products. I have Three Pc’s that I have bought over a twelve year period.
Hope it helps.