OT: Dell Laptop For Sale

[Nicholas Leippe]

On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 2:41 PM, William Attwood <wattwood at gmail.com> wrote:
> Honestly, with the Mean Time to Failure (MTF) of these devices, if you
> purchase it and expect everything to work fine for years, you're dreaming.
>  Based on the age of the device, the MTF is coming up or passed on multiple
> items.  It's a used laptop, it's cheap, and can be used and fixed as needed.
>
>
> No need to jump on warranty stuff, by the age, the thing will fail for other
> reasons than over-heating...  Just know the drive is at the MTF, the memory
> might be near MTF, the DVD-ROM might be near MTF, etc. etc..  Cheap
> replacements, though.

Yes, hard drives and optical drives are cheap and easy to replace, but
video chips are not.

So, expecting to replace a hard drive or optical drive in a used
laptop is one thing, but the motherboard is quite another.
Knowing that the video chip is already known defective, and more
likely to fail than in a model where it is not defective, could be a
valuable data point to decision making in such a purchase. That's my
only point.