By Suzana Things You Should Know Before Investing In Cheap Laptops
It’s only too easy to go for deals on cheap laptops. However, these deals don’t come without a catch. A brand new laptop may cost twice, or even three times as much as a cheap laptop, but you get to enjoy perks. Depending on the company and/or the store, brand new units have warranty sets. Usually, during the first week, you can exchange your laptop for another unit if you discover a factory defect. For the next year, you also get to enjoy free service warranty either from the manufacturer or the store. Whatever happens, the extra money you paid acts like insurance.
If a brand new laptop is way over your budget, though, there’s nothing to fear. You can also get cheap laptops that function as well as brand new units, although you’ll have to do without manufacturer warranties. Most of these do have 6 months of shop service warranty, so you can still enjoy free repairs for minor defects. These are refurbished inexpensive laptops.
Remember the defective units you sent back because they have factory defects? They’ve been sent back to the manufacturer for repairs, and because the box seals were broken, they can’t be sold as brand new laptops anymore. While the defective parts were replaced with brand new, working ones, these refurbished low-cost laptops now go for as low as half of their original prices. Now, this is a deal frugal techies usually go for.
The most risky types of cheap laptops to buy are used ones. These are most likely to be in bad shape because their former users failed to take better care of them. Others are just really old-over three years old-so they’re most likely to have defective keyboards, dead pixels on the screen, a faulty hard disk, etc. The luckiest you can get when you’re buying used reasonably priced laptops is if the unit was only a few months to a year old and the former owner had to sell it because he needs the cash. If you’re buying used reasonably priced laptops, you should only buy them from someone you can trust-whether it’s a friend who can take care of his things well, or a credible store who examines used gadgets first before reselling them.
You should avoid buying cheap laptops that are over three years old because these are bound to have operating systems that are also too old to run most of the programs you’re using for work. If you must buy a cheap laptop, go for models that are two years old or newer. Look at the memory too because you shouldn’t settle for anything smaller than 128MB.
