posted on May 10, 2001 06:24:24 AM new
I'm a novice to put it mildly. The dilemma I have is this...my son is moving out (hooray)and I have the chance to buy his computer which is all set up and which I use for ebay and poking around. It's 3 years old and is HP Pavilion 4450. He would like half of its original cost which is 700. Is this a good move? Neither one of us has a clue (which you've probably already figured out). Any advice would be helpful. Thanks
posted on May 10, 2001 06:30:55 AM new
LOL on your son moving out....guess what?? They seem to keep moving back in!!
Seems to me that is not a good deal. You really ought to check out the new ones at Best Buys, ect., or even Gateway. You might be surprised at what you see.
posted on May 10, 2001 07:01:40 AM new
$700 is too much for a 3 year-old computer! You could pay just a bit more--$999--for a brand new one that has more RAM and a ton more HD memory (3 years ago 1G was considered huge--today most come with 10-20G or more).
posted on May 10, 2001 07:10:32 AM new
Bad deal, Mom, and your kid knows it. He wants $700 to buy a new one for himself. HP isn't worth the money. Try Dell or Gateway and you'll probably get a nice one, more memory, more everything for another couple hundred dollars.
I don't understand what you mean about set up for ebay. What's there to set up? Templates? Those you can transfer over (or your son can if he's nice). You don't have to reregister or anything. Your email address will have to be changed though unless he gets a new one.
Just give him the computer and tell him since it's his, he's free to sell it and buy a new one. But he knows he won't get $700 for it on the outside. My son just bought a laptop from a guy at college for only $500! It was a $2500 laptop. The other kid took a loss because that was all he needed for a new desktop computer.
posted on May 10, 2001 07:22:07 AM new
Thanks to all of you. I will look into other alternatives.
May I impose for one more question. When going on a new computer will I be able to keep my existing ID's, passwords and email address? Also, will my ebay feedback, etc. remain intact? The extent of my knowledge is how to turn it on and off so please excuse what may be dumb questions to those of you who I admire and envy for your savvy.
posted on May 10, 2001 09:56:37 AM new
romantiques, if you're talking about your ID, password and email on ebay, of course you can keep what you have! The only difference would be if your son wants your current email address (my son set it up with our ISP under his email ID)for his own, then you would have to get another email address. However, if you use the same ISP as you're using now and they provide your email, there should be no changes. They don't care if you use a 3 year old computer or a brand new one. As long as you pay your bill ...
As far as ebay, if you do decide to change your email address, you can do so easily. Feedback always follows you unless you totally cancel your current ID and register under a new one altogether. If you just change ID's and keep the old one intact without cancelling it, your feedback follows. I hope this makes sense.
Just as a help, when I first started on ebay, I used the computer at the public library. I didn't have one. Sometimes when my computer crashes or as it happened once, my modem fried, I went to the library to use theirs. It matters not where the computer is located as long as you continue to use your ID and password.
posted on May 10, 2001 10:02:53 AM new
mtnmama..Thanks again. Very helpful and I actually understood what you were saying..maybe there's hope for me yet!
posted on May 10, 2001 12:50:21 PM new
Actually, Gateway has a pretty good idea on their hands : just pay something like $19.99 a month and your computer will always be top-of-the-line. What they do is have you send your computer in once a year and they'll transfer everything over to the hottest, newest, most packed pc configuration on the market and ship that back to you. Do that every year. It's a heck of a deal -- even I'm tempted!
posted on May 10, 2001 12:58:37 PM new
romantiques,
I highly recommend Dell. Just got a brand new computer. Came in under a grand. Support is great, no probs. And they financed me for a little less interest than it would have been if I'd put it on my cc.
I've heard good things about Gateway, but mostly, "Customer service is great, they kept taking back my computer 'til it was right." Since I needed my computer to arrive only once, I went with Dell.
posted on May 10, 2001 07:12:07 PM new
Borillar - That is a great deal from Gateway.
I am going to look into that and see if they will leave my DSL set-up intact.
My former boss would never trade in or throw away a computer because he was afraid someone would see the slimy porno he collected on it.
I finally convinced him he could take the harddrive out and put it on the demag at work for demagnetizing steel that has been held down on a magnetic chuck. I was hoping to get a free harddrive but it totally destroyed it instead of just erasing it.
posted on May 10, 2001 07:23:46 PM new
I have a 3 year old Gateway. The customer service (which was supposed to be "gold" for which I paid extra) was no better than the regular customer service. They all read out of the same manual.
I'd take my chances on Dell next time around.
Gateway has a bad habit of sending out reconditioned monitors, etc. We looked in our harddrive to add a component and found it was jeri-rigged. We're on our 4th keyboard and 5th monitor. We kept getting monitors that were reconditioned and they finally admitted it and sent us a new one. This one hasn't had any problems yet.
posted on May 10, 2001 07:39:41 PM new
romantiques - I LOVE Compac. Their computers are very well-made. IBM would be my second choice. Hewlett Packard for your printer, and if you're looking for a flatbed scanner, I'd go with Umax.
posted on May 10, 2001 08:56:07 PM new
I was just going to mention the same thing, gravid, about reformatting. However, there are various levels of formatting, believe it or not. The most severe one is the factory format. That's where every single bit space on the drive gets mapped for errors. Not even a so-called Low-Level format will do that thorough a job. I doubt that you'd get much of a performance reformating it the regular way, but you could always send it back to the factory to redo the format for a fee. Cheaper than buying a new hard drive.
The next time that anyone wants that sort of an erase job, just purchasee and install a copy of Norton Speed Disk or Norton Utilities which contains Speed Disk. There is an option when optimizing the hard drive is to "wipe" the empty spaces. What that does is to put a zero "0" in every bit space in the blank places on your hard drive. Short of God or a Time Machine to take you back before this proces, not even the FBI could get the information back.
He wants $700 to buy a new one for himself. HP isn't worth the money. Try Dell or Gateway and you'll probably get a nice one, more memory, more everything for another couple hundred dollars.