skou said:
I buy ....carcasses, off of Ebay,fix them up, and sell them.
I can usually have one ready for about $300, or so. If you know what you're doing, you can do the same thing.
Oh, MrB did the same thing with his Compaq. Built it up himself, I mean.
steve
Indeed I did. I got extremely lucky in my project though, and built it for quite a bit less than $300, but that's a good ballpark figure for something like this.
Basically, look on eBAY for a slightly older model, that's got parts available there as well. Find one that's fairly complete, with like a broken screen, bad motherboard, missing pieces, and rebuild it with the parts listed by other sellers, as they part identical systems out. Late P/// systems are now being parted out regularly...
My lucky story? Well, I started out by getting a lower bare shell. Bottom pan, top, with touchpad, keyboard, no guts, no LCD assy. parts. I then found a guy parting out the same exact model...he'd listed the CPU, ram, drives, battery, AC adapter, but no chassis or LCD parts. I sent him a mesage thru eBAY, inquiring about the rest of the machine.
He was using the machine, and one day it stopped recognizing USB devices, so he did what any of us would do...reboot it. It never came back on. Either he, or someone else, diag'ed it as a bad motherboard, so he decided to part it out on eBAY, after buying a newer laptop.
I got the rest of the parts, basically everything but what was mentioned above, for $90, plus my old AIW7500 in trade. I got it basically thinking I was getting a working LCD.
I got the bonus plan.
I got a CPU, and some ram. I had an older Presario from the same family line, that I could "borrow" the drives, battery, and AC adapter from. I rebuilt it, put in a fully charged battery, plugged in the AC, hit the button and.......nothing. Well, not exactly nothing...the AC power LED lit, and I could hear the HDD spinning, but it didn't boot.
Now, I've had desktop boards, KNOWN dead, that would do this (LEDs, fans and drives spin), so I figured I got what I paid for...a working LCD and bad mobo.
A couple days later, someone posted in here a thread about another laptop from the same family (slightly different model, but virtually identical). He'd swapped in a faster CPU, and now it wouldn't boot. Hit the button, and the LED lit, and the HDD spins, no boot. Someone mentioned to him to pull the CMOS battery for a few minutes (as there's no jumper to clear the CMOS on these), and try again. This worked for him, and he was on his merry way. It dawned on me
I hadn't done this on mine.... So, apart it came again, and I pulled the CMOS battery off the mobo. While it was like that, just for extra measure, I held the power button on for 30+ seconds, which I'd read will fully drain the capacitors on the board.
I put it back together, battery back in, AC back on, and danged if it didn't fire right up.
Been running perfect ever since.
Shortly thereafter, I snagged an LCD bezel assy. on eBAY for dirt cheap, effectively giving me a complete plastics kit (a full second laptop with no guts). If it ever stops raining here, and gets warmer, that'll get a custom paint job, and I'll swap the internals over into it.
Actually, just last night I picked up a new toy for it....a USB to PS2 converter cable. This'll let me plug a PS2 keyboard and mouse into one USB port (my lappy doesn't have external PS2 ports, but does have 2 USB ports). What this will let me do is to tap my laptop into my KVM if I wanted, letting me use my Logitech Mx Duo (wireless KB/Mx700 mouse), and 17" desktop monitor if I want. I connect to the net with a wireless card, and my printer is shared out on my network. So I don't use those ports on my lappy (LPT1 and LAN)
Poor man's docking station...$12.00 at WalMart.
But anyways...the idea is, if you're looking for a machine to do these basics, you can probably build one for real cheap, and might even find one intact for real cheap too. I've seen some clowns on eBAY selling the LCD for my laptop for $200, and the CDRW for $100+.
HOWEVER; I've seen entire, running systems (my lappy..the Presario 17xx Series) sell for $275-400. (depending on exact specs...these came with CPUs from a P/// 500 to 1GHz, and from 128 MB of system ram to 512). These are older, used systems, so if you went this route, expect scratches, worn keys, etc... But realize you can probably pick up a used keyboard thru eBAY for it for $10 or so, and probably any plastics that are real beat up for short money too.
It depends on how ambitious you are. Maybe you're not, and a refurb system from Dell is better for you, than building your own.
"Now, you know the full story......I'm Paul Harvey....Good day."
B.
