My office has a Dell Latitude X200 laptop, which I might want to buy if the price is right. I don’t know what a fair price for this machine is and I can’t find one anywhere. Ebay doesn’t have any for sale right now; neither does the Dell Outlet.
Specs:
Bought 11/02 (still under warranty until 11/05)
30 gig hard drive
384 MB RAM
Pentium III 800 MHz processor
WinXP Professional with license
What is a fair price for this? I’m not looking for the company to “make” money because it might be me buying it. I have a feeling that even when there were some of the same on Ebay, the price was higher than the lowest possible “fair” because those sellers wanted to make as much as they could, naturally; and they had put work into reformatting, de-virusing, etc., which doesn’t apply here. (I’ve already done that as part of my job so I don’t need to build that into the price.) Anyone have any info or suggestions where I might look?
It’s not really the same thing; it’s not that I want to buy a laptop; I want to buy THIS laptop. This laptop is already configured exactly for me, I know exactly what’s on it, I know the whole history of who owned it, who used it, every piece of software ever installed on it. It’s not that I’m looking for a laptop but I would buy THIS one if the price were right. The prices at Dell are figuring in what it cost them to refurbish and reconfigure, which don’t apply here since I, myself, already did it. I don’t need to pay my company a profit for the hours I spent reformatting, configuring, cleaning up, installing anti-virus, checking the system, etc. I just don’t know what price my employer should charge me - a price that is fair but isn’t trying to be the most money they can get for it.
Depending on the condition and other specs, between $400-450. There are not many completed auctions for more than that. As I’m sure you know, prices can be highly variable and it’s tough to say what is “fair” to you and your employer. You probably couldn’t buy an identical machine for much less than 400, but you could buy a brand new machine with much better specs for a couple hundred dollars more. At the same time, if your employer tried calling a used computer store they’d probably offer less than $300.
Many people buying used laptops off ebay expect to have to replace the battery at a cost of 75 bucks give or take. So use that in negotiations with your employer.
When I want to gauge the fair market value (FMV) for something, I look it up on eBay. By looking at how many bids there are, and how close it is to the end of the auction, I can get a pretty good idea of the FMV.
Check out this ebay search; it lists all the Dell Latitude X200 laptops that have sold in the past 30 days. The highest one sold for $555, and the lowest one was $422; there was one non-working one sold for parts for $234. Depending on accessories and peripherals, I would say $450 to $500.
Fear Itself, if you’d only look at your own link you’d see that the machine that sold for $555 was an anomaly not worth mentioning in the context of this post. Even on ebay completed auctions, where you can generally get an idea of the market value of an item, you can still get cases where folks just pay more than what an item is worth. You have to look at the search results with some idea of statistical probability- some machines might sell for more, some less. To further complicate matters, items that come up with the same simple search terms may vary widely in what is actually included in the auction.
For example, the $555 machine had additional peripherals, including a media bay, three drives, a WiFi card and an extra AC adapter. Should Missbunny figure that into the price? Of course not. The next highest price for a completed auction was $450, and there are no other completed auctions in the 450-500 range, just machines with high buy it now prices or ones that never got any bids because the price was too high. In other words, only one of ebay’s millions of users paid over 450 for a similar computer within the last month.
When using ebay completed auctions, you absolutely must make sure you are not comparing apples to oranges. Secondly, you should get an idea of the median price, i.e., half the people that bought paid more, and use that as your upper limit.
And to Missbunny, not to labor my earlier point, but there are decent brand new 2Ghz notebooks available for a couple hundred more.
Which is why I qualified my estimate, ‘Depending on accessories and peripherals’. **Missbunny ** didn’t list all the peripherals her laptop includes, so we don’t know how it compares. It is up to Missbunny to decide which are apples, and which are oranges; she has the computer, I don’t.
I agree, it is probably not worth $555; that’s why my estimate is much lower. I only included that sale to indicate the range.
I know, but the feature that the X200 has that none of those other laptops have is the incredibly light weight. It’s only 2.9 pounds. I also have a Latitude D600, which is “only” 4.7 pounds, and the difference is shocking. The D600 is MUCH heavier to lug around, and since I have to walk quite a ways to and from work, even that couple of pound difference is too much. If there are any laptops in the $700 range that weigh only 2.9 pounds, I’ve never seen them written up anywhere.
Plus, I don’t really need this laptop or any laptop. If this particular one were cheap enough I’d buy it, but I don’t need to go buy a new one - I’ve already got my D600, plus a desktop, plus a couple of older laptops that are good enough for surfing in my living room, although they are not wireless and probably can’t be (too old).
The X200 in question does have a detached media bay with CD-RW (not sure about DVD) and also has a wireless card. Overall though, it sounds as though roughly $450 would be the “retail” price (so I would probably offer to pay lower). I’ll have to make sure my company doesn’t want to keep it just in case we need an extra at some point, which I am afraid they might.