Good experience with refurb Latitude laptop (2 Viewers)

[Dennis Nicholls]

SUMMARY. If you buy a refurbished PC, check to see the age and quality of the "new" disk they ship with it.

My newest used PC had an original ship date of May 2019. But the disk they shipped with it had a manufacturing date of March 2011. Using the Seagate Seatools test software I discovered it had over 93K power on hours! That's over 10 years power on.

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

I'm on my third generation of used laptops today.

A while ago I bought a used Latitude 3570 laptop which would be Win 10 only. Now about the same time as a friend's laptop broke last week I found a decent used Latitude 3500 laptop on eBay for $120. So I worked a deal with my friend to unload my 3570 on him for a nominal price and bought the 3500.

The 3500 arrived today. Sold with disk removed as is typical. The seller was great: the brackets and screws for the disk were put back in. I installed a new NVMe 512GB drive and had the laptop up and running Win 10 Pro in an hour after UPS dropped it off. After upgrading the BIOS from 4 to 26 (!) I upgraded to Win 11 Pro. It's astonishing to get a Win 11 Pro laptop for under $200 including all the parts I needed.

Specs: i5-8265U processor, 12 GB memory, 512 GB NVMe SSD, 1080P display.

I'm really pleased with eBay seller "proearthtech" in Rhode Island. He's sold 41,000 items on eBay with a 99.9% positive feedback.

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

I'm getting more and more bold in buying laptops. I won an eBay auction for another Latitude 3500 for $42. Arrived completely dead though. I was able to buy a new motherboard for $35 so that laptop is now up and running. I'm pleased that I was able to change motherboards without damaging anything inside the laptop. The only fly in the ointment was that the new motherboard turned out to come from a laptop that Dell sold loaded with Ubuntu Linux so it didn't come with a Windows license key.

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

OK so I bought a Win 10 Pro key for $24 and got a 512GB Kingston NVMe SSD for $29. With memory I'm only in about $145 for another quality Win 11 Pro laptop. My repair job seems solid. I can't say that for another cheap 3500 I bought which rebuffs all my attempts at fixing. This last one appears to have had liquid spilled on the keyboard at one point in its hard life.

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

I need to name my last two 3500s "$50" and "$51". The $50 apparently had liquid spilled on the keyboard and got onto the motherboard too. Cleaning the motherboard got it to do a few things but at least I could determine that the display was in good shape. I then bought at auction the $51 one which was functional but had a damaged display. I swapped the displays between the units and now have a fully functional 3500 and a "parts" 3500. I've pulled two expensive items out of the $50 unit: a nearly new battery and the display head.

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

OK with a cheap $40 i3 motherboard I've even gotten the $50 parts 3500 up and running. Only an i3 and with some damage along the LHS of the display, otherwise fully functional. I think I'll sell it off locally on Craigslist for about $100 to recover my costs. Some poor student etc. will like a decent $100 laptop running a legal copy of Win 11.

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

Damn. I need to keep away from eBay.

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

A working $48 3500 laptop arrived yesterday. Came with i3 MB and 8GB memory sans disk. I added an open box $18 NVMe SSD and loaded up Win 11. Dumb seller scheduled the auction to end at 7 am Monday pacific time - nobody there was up to compete with my bid. This is really becoming a game with me.

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

Damn. I need to keep away from eBay.

Well I broke my promise to myself and won another broke 3500 for $31. Very nice and clean unit, diagnostic leds immediately said bad motherboard. Motherboard prices are going down - I got a replacement i5 one for $39. I'd already bought a 500GB NVMe SSD for another project for $24, which in the event turned out not to be needed. The open box SSD only had 62 power-on-hours so it's basically new. Used DDR4 memory prices have dropped since early 2023, and I got 16GB for $20.

This is a very clean unit for the price. The keyboard looks completely unused. It even came with a bonus. Sold as missing a disk, I found the original NVMe SSD lying on top of the battery under the bottom cover. The tech who pulled the disk forgot and left it there. It's only 256GB but it's a handy spare for me.

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

OK with a cheap $40 i3 motherboard I've even gotten the $50 parts 3500 up and running. Only an i3 and with some damage along the LHS of the display, otherwise fully functional. I think I'll sell it off locally on Craigslist for about $100 to recover my costs. Some poor student etc. will like a decent $100 laptop running a legal copy of Win 11.

All of my crappy parts go into this laptop. The replacement motherboard died, so I found i3 motherboards for the 3500 are now down to the $20 range. So I put a second i3 motherboard into this system, which I now refer to as the "DOG" system.