I’m going to sell my laptop on eBay. What should I know?
Make absolutely sure it’s in working order!
Describe in detail the make, model, OS, accessories, etc.
Note all physical marks, scuffs, and so on. Include pictures if needed.
Take a nice sharp picture.
Check your spelling!
Include shipping insurance. You’ll be glad you did. Absorb it in the selling price.
When you ship it, use some sort of delivery confirmation so you’ll know that the person did indeed get it.
Do your research. Which means spending hours browsing the Laptop catagory. Work out what are the good selling points of adverts, and what makes them look bad. And work out how to not look like one of the corporate/scam merchants that plague the computer sections of ebay.
But primarily, I agree with Mr Blue Sky - make the description descriptive!!
Take a look at other laptops for sale that are similar to yours. Check out the completed auctions, too. That will tell you how many bidded for your model and what the final price is.
Restrict your sale to the U.S. only. Chances are you won’t get a sale anyway, but this ensures it won’t happen. Shipping overseas is more expensive (which the seller would have to pay), and also means filling out customs forms, which can be a pain for a first-time seller.
You may want to look into accepting PayPal. At the premiere level (which is free), they take a percentage off the bid price (about 2.5 percent, I think, which is about what stores get charged for credit card transactions). A lot of people prefer to pay by PayPal, so that expands your potential customer base. And if you link one of your bank accounts to PayPal, you can have the money wired directly to your account (that’s free as well). I checked the ebay community boards, and while there’s a lot of complaints about it, I haven’t had a problem with it, and a co-worker who sells trains on ebay swears by it.
Lots of scammers go after high-end electronics sellers. Western Union is not safe. Don’t trust anyone who is willing to pay absurd amounts for overnight FedEx to foreign countries.
Realize that if you are new to eBay (I don’t know if you are or not) and have no feedback, you are not going to get as much for the laptop as you will if you have feedback.
I see no particular reason to avoid international sales - you can specify overseas shipping costs in the advert, so the buyer is paying them, and the filling out of customs forms is hardly the most difficult thing in the world. Plus, with Paypal, receiveing payment from overseas is completely straightforward.
Don’t sell it as a labtop. 
How do you determine shipping costs? It’s not just UPS or USPS to a unknown destination, but there’s also packaging, insurance, and other incidentals.
If someone emails you before the end of the auction and asks you to end the auction so they can buy it outright, don’t do it! Even if it is what you consider a good price, many times the ending price will exceed the offer. Scammers often make these offers, don’t get sucked in.
I totally agree with getting feedback first, I wouldn’t even consider buying a big-ticket item from a 0 feedback seller.
Western Union, either money orders or its auction payment system (formerly called BidPay), is really safe for sellers. There are a bit risky for buyers. PayPal, OTOH, is reversed. It’s so easy to get screwed as a seller I can’t believe it’s an allowable payment system.
Exactly. When I’ve been browsing around for Macs to buy, I will sometimes notice one that went for a dirt cheap price, or didn’t sell at all. Almost always, the seller had no feedback. It matters that much. If you don’t have any feedback, I think it’s worth waiting a month or two and buying a few small items (stuff you want anyway) to build up your feedback.
I won’t link to the item, but it’s been posted on eBay. Thank you all for your help.