So im going to view a laptop I'm interested in buying in a couple of hours. It's a Sony Vaio PCG 91111M I5 6GB Ram 500GB HDD ATI Graphics 17in Screen I found the seller on Gumtree and he says its all boxed with charger and manuals and wants £230 for it which seems like a decent price. I'm putting together a checklist so what would be the main things to look for and is there any software i could run from a USB stick to test it out. Also does anyone know what keys you press to access the desktop from the windows setup screen on a new install? i cant remember what it was
The things that are likely to be wrong with a second hand laptop are: Knackered battery - not much you can do to test this except run it on battery for a bit. You can pick up replacement batteries though. Runs too hot because it's full of fluff - you should be able to see this just from looking and touching the laptop, but it's an easy fix. Knackered harddrive - really slow access, random errors, or ticking sounds will give this away. Up to you if you bargain the price down and replace it or walk away. Dodgy motherboard/RAM - 5 minutes of Memtest will tell you if it's got big problems, but it doesn't always pick up errors in my experience. Knackered keyboard - check for loose keys, and check that they all work if you can. Replacement keyboards are usually cheap though. Oh, and you might want to run CPU-Z and GPU-Z to make sure it does have the CPU/GPU that the seller is claiming. If you do find problems, try getting the seller to reduce their price and just replace bits yourself. If you can convince them it's almost unfixable you might pick yourself up a bargain.
thanks for the info, i found a website called portableapps.com which came in very handy, downloaded their software onto USB and used that to help me test. The HDD was reporting relocated sectors and a slowish read/write time and there was a key "broken" on the keyboard which was just a loose butterfly clip and was fixed as soon as i got home, managed to drop the price down to £190 which i think was a bargain
Sounds like you got yourself a good deal there - definitely needs a new hdd but other than that it sounds like decent specs for the price
