STEVE CASSIDY’S REAL-WORLD TIPS FOR Secondhand BUYERS
With over 20 years of dumpster-diving, small-ad scanning and screwdriver flourishing, here’s Steve Cassidy’s five rules for secondhand buying
1 Never spend all your budget on the machine
Have a float left over for semi-consumable parts, especially hard drives in all kinds of machines and batteries in laptops. Putting in a new drive (especially an SSD) often revolutionises even the most ancient or humble machine with a decent corporate architecture and storage chipset.
2 High-2 end kit is risky
Top-end machines – gamer’s laptops, liquid-cooled deskside PCs, servers with four CPU sockets – are a much bigger risk secondhand. Those exotic parts may only be supported by one OS release, or they may cost the Earth to replace, or be very short-lived when pushed to run at full tilt. Mid-range machines are easier to live with than either the superstar topenders or the bargain basement stuff.
3 Find out how much parts cost
I’ve replaced lots of drives, memory and a few power supplies in secondhand machines. ThinkPad keyboards, for example, are between £30 and £60. You can also get replacement palmrests and other plastics. Quite a lot of laptops are sold because the keyboard is packed with detritus and isn’t working right – there’s nothing wrong with the rest of the machine. Squirty foam plastic cleaner can work wonders on neglected machines, too. Invest in an air-duster aerosol with the long plastic probe, to blast out the CPU heatsink. Be aware that some desktops will be holding on to a lot of grot, packed into every little space. I’ve even taken to cleaning my new arrivals out in the open air.
4 Evaluate the seller carefully
Even though you’re very unlikely to make a warranty claim or invoke your consumer rights on secondhand gear, do your homework. Private sellers tend to overvalue and don’t sell until the machine is on its last legs. Brokers work on volume, and don’t like being treated as your own private repair and support centre. Assume that any secondhand machine won’t be repaired for you and that preventative maintenance, such as hard drive replacements and cleaning up the cooling system, is going to be your responsibility. However, don’t be a classic alarmist consumer about this issue – I have at least one machine that’s 11 years old, bought secondhand for £120 and earning it’s keep even now.
5 Look at your rights to reload or change the operating system
It used to be possible to just throw a CD in the drive and reload from scratch, or reload images, or make use of recovery partitions. Newer PCs with UEFI BIOSes don’t necessarily react well to any of these options: you can end up with a brick. This risk goes double – or more – for the new wave of Windows tablets, where you can’t add storage or plug in a keyboard for funky BIOS access keystrokes without exactly the right type of OTG adapter, powered USB hub and so on. Once again, the rule is to stick to the middle ground unless you or a friend are very familiar with the reload process and re-application of software keys.