Before you buy a used laptop,
think about what you are going to do with it and how much your budget is. Here are some
general guidelines:
Light wordprocessing and spreadsheet work at home. For such light use, even a used 80486 laptop will do. Used 486 laptops generally come with 4MB
of memory and 120MB hard drive and run well on Windows 3.11. These used laptops don't have enough power to
run Windows 95 or 98 but Win3.11 is good enough for this kind of workload. Price range
$150 to $200.
Light e-mail, wordprocessing and spreadsheet work. A used 486 laptop will do with a 14.4kbps
modem. Some people like to give their parents a used 486 laptop so they can keep in
touch with them via e-mail. Used 486
laptops generally come with 4MB of memory and 120MB hard drive and run well on Windows
3.11. These used laptops don't have
enough power to run Windows 95 or 98 but Win3.11 is good enough for this kind of workload.
Price range $200 to $300.
Web surfing, e-mail and wordprocessing / spreadsheets. Low end used pentium laptops, Pentium 75 to 120
will work just fine. They generally have 16MB of memory and 800MB of hard disk space and
you can run Windows 95 on them. Go with a 28.8 or 33.6kbps modem. Generally they don't
have internal cd-rom drives but if needed, you can buy external cd-rom
drives for such used laptops.
Price range $300 to $450.
Medium level web surfing, e-mail, general home/office use and school work: Go
with a used Pentium 133 or higher
laptop with 16MB or more memory and 1.3GB or bigger hard drives. You can use Windows
98 on them if memory is 32MB or higher. Go with a 56.6kbps modem. Generally they don't
have internal cd-rom drives but if needed, you can buy external cd-rom
drives for such used laptops. Price range $500 to $700.
Heavy work load, web surfing, data access. Go with a Pentium 233 or higher with
atleast 48MB of Memory, 3.2GB hard drive, Windows 98, internal cd-rom drive and a
12.1" screen size. A 56.6kbps modem is a must. Price range $500 to $950.
BABER.com has a considerable stock of used laptops. For
current prices, Click
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