I’m looking to buy a new laptop. I’ve got my eyes on the Dell Inspiron 8500. For the package I want, Dell.com is asking $1648, minus a $300 rebate which next week might be a $200 rebate etc, making the price around $1350.
On ebay there are many people selling brand new Dell notebook of the same configuration. Here’s one with 8hrs left with a current price of $1150. Another one now with 10hrs left is going for $610. Not I guess there will be a lot of sniping at the last second of the auction to raise the price, but why do these laptops seems to be so cheap?
Anyone have any experiences buying Laptops (specifically Dell) from ebay? What are the possible pitfalls? Good deal? Should I be wary?
The Dell’s on Ebay are likely refurbished. My boyfriend bought one recently straight from Dell (new not refurbished) and asked the same thing on the phone with Dell and they said the same thing. The Ebay sellers buy off their refurbished laptops (or other nonfunctioning ones) retool them and sell them for a small profit.
Well, since this is IMHO, I’ll state that my opinion is that Dells are pieces of crap. My entire department has Dells and hate them. They’re noisy and not user-friendly. All of the disc drives are recessed so you can’t see what the hell you’re plugging into where and the USB ports are behind a door that you can’t leave open without banging your ankle on it. IS is down here every day working on these things. We have two Dell laptops, which require physically changing out the 3.5" with the CD drive, which means shutting down the friggin’ computer if you need to change drives. People are probably selling them cheaply just to unload the damn things.
Your opinion is certainly noted Chefguy, but those issues aren’t really problems for me. I couldn’t care less about a 3.5" drive and I’m really not sure what you are talking about disc drives being recessed and not being able to “see what the hell you’re plugging into where”.
dorkusmalorkus, refurb’d was my first guess as well. But they both say “BRAND NEW” and the second one (cheaper of the two) even goes so far as to explicitly say “NOT REFURBISHED”.
Any other thoughts? Why wouldn’t I spend $700 for a $1300 computer?
Huh, Chefguy, I guess I can see some of your arguments, but…my company has them almost exclusively and we’ve had no problems at all, really. We’ve had some of these for four years, with no serious outages/hardware breakage (at least none that weren’t directly attributable to some user doing some damn insane thing like jamming two floppies into the drive at once or something).
Of course, we upgraded our computers from IBM’s, so we’re pretty much happy with anything as long as they’re reliable and not built out of cardboard and tinfoil…
They are cheap & new too (Did you shop Dell’s used store too? Even cheaper there sometimes, but stock changes hourly) because the people who bought them bought them for cheap. Dell coupons & specials are plentyful. You can get laptops for $1000 if you get them at the right time. Some sites that show you how are techbargains.comxpbargains.comfatwallet.com