Laptop auction at work, need buying advice

My work is auctioning off some older laptops and I am interested in replacing a computer at home. Problem is, I don’t have a lot of knowledge about laptops in general and would love some advice. Specifically, I would like to know how powerful (or not) these machines are and how high I should bid.

Here is a list of what is available:
**
All laptops are Dell Latitude D620 or D630 models with Windows XP **

Harddrive - 75 GB, Processor - 2.5GHz
Memory - 2 GB

Harddrive - 111 GB, Processor - 2.5GHz
Memory - 2 GB

Harddrive - 55 GB, Processor - 2GHz
Memory - 2 GB

Harddrive - 56 GB, Processor - 2GHz
Memory - 2 GB

Harddrive - 75 GB, Processor - 2GHz
Memory - 3 GB

Harddrive - 111 GB, Processor - 2GHz
Memory - 1 GB

Harddrive - 55 GB, Processor - 2GHz
Memory - 1 GB

Harddrive - 55 GB, Processor - 1.83GHz
Memory - 2 GB

Harddrive - 56 GB Processor - 1.83GHz
Memory - 2 GB

Harddrive - 56 GB, Processor - 1.83GHz
Memory - 1 GB

In this order, Higher processor equal faster.
Higher memory allows you to run most programs.
Bigger hard drive equals more room.

Since Windows alone can eat up an 40 gb hard drive in a heartbeat, go as high as you can.

Liz

Thanks southernlady, any advice on high to go for this one:

Harddrive - 111 GB, Processor - 2.5GHz
Memory - 2 GB

current bid is $110

I wouldn’t go much higher than that. As Cracked points out, computers decline in value faster than bananas, so there’s no point in buying unless you can get a real deal.

FMV for that one is about $160.

(I work for a used computer resale company)

ETA: Ninja’d!

How old is it…anything over 2 years, I would not even bother. You can get a brand new cheap laptop that has a warranty. Go to TigerDirect and check those prices.

The Dell Latitude 620 came out in 2006
The Dell Latitude 630 came out in 2007

Both are SERIOUSLY outdated.

They’re all fine for Windows XP. 2GB RAM will be better than 1GB if you like having lots of programs running, or a web browser with a ton of tabs. You probably won’t see much difference going up to 3GB. On later versions of Windows, 2GB can get a little tight.
You need a big hard disk for storing things like video, games, certain heavyweight applications, very big music collections. Otherwise, they’re all fine. I have used a Windows 7 laptop with a 75GB disk for many years without running out of space, using typical office applications.

If you can get a look at them, I would pick one that looks to be in the best physical condition.

We currently have a VERY old and outdated desktop at home and are looking to replace it. Finances are too tight now to get a new one so I figured that one of the auction ones would get us by until we could get a proper unit.

We don’t need a powerful machine. We don’t use it for gaming at all and don’t store a lot on the hard drive. We have another notebook already that is our primary machine and it’s less than 2 years old. The most memory intensive thing the auction one would be used for is largish Excel worksheets.

Seconded. Unless you have some immense need for a working XP laptop “right now” you are looking at machines that have already exceeded their useful life. The improvements in CPU, RAM, and I/O are going to make a $299 walmart special look like a dream machine by comparison. MS is also about to retire XP including shutting down the update and activation servers (although rumor has is there will a patch to no longer require activation)

We are looking to fully replace our outdated desktop within a year or two. This laptop would just have to see us through to that time. I figure if I can get a good enough deal, it might be worth it.

I’d personally value none of those laptops at more than $50-60 - new laptops that are much more powerful and importantly, are likely to have working keyboards & batteries, are <$300, as linked above. Plus they come with windows 7 or windows 8 which despite the crap you might hear, are fully supported with updates & more stable operating systems than Windows XP (ignoring the metro interface).
Don’t necessarily be fooled by the clockspeed either- something like this: Lenovo Laptop Intel Pentium dual-core B950 (2.10GHz) 4GB Memory 320GB HDD Intel HD Graphics 15.6" Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit G570 (4334EGU) - Newegg.com has a processor that is probably 7 or 8 times as fast at the laptops you are looking at (PassMark CPU Benchmarks - New Laptop CPUs Performance)

Office (Excel spreadsheets) is one of the most memory intensive AND larger programs created. Mine is an older office version and it uses 333 MB just in space…that does not include how much memory it uses in terms of actual use. One of the largest programs I have installed. And mine is the Home and Student Version from 2007.

As another has mentioned, XP is near End of Life…which is why your company is finally getting rid of the equipment…that and they have LONG outlived the useful life for a computer. Average lifespan of a computer is 3 years. Yes, there are exceptions but the bad thing about those are the lack of warranty support. A CHEAP new laptop will at least give you a year.

I would not, personally, pay more than $50 for one of the ones listed.

Liz

Those hard drives are all quite small - OK for a corporate machine where all the documents are on a network share - not so good for home use.

I agree with jacobsta811 - I personally wouldn’t spend more than pocket money prices on machines of that spec, and then only if I wanted a machine for some single-purpose project, such as a home CCTV project or a retro gaming unit or some such.

Also, the battery in those machines probably can’t be expected to work at all - and if they don’t come with the charger/PSU, don’t even consider buying.

Thanks everyone!

But that’s less than 1% of the smallest hard disk on offer here. Windows XP will take a couple of GB, large applications maybe the same… seems to me that as long as you don’t have video or heavyweight games or huge amounts of music on there, 56GB is enough. It’ll take an awful long time to fill it up with docs, xls, pdfs etc.

I agree that for such old laptops the suggested prices don’t seem like compelling bargains, but disregarding the price I think they’d all be fine for the duties mentioned by the OP.

I use a 300gb hard drive with an external drive for storing everything but the program files and windows and still have used 232 gb of space. ALL my documents/photos/etc reside on the external and take up another 300 gb of space. I also have 4 gb of memory at my disposal and still run into the “out of memory” issue when using Windows.

Liz

OK. It would be ineresting to run WinDirStat on your internal drive to see what is using up that 232GB. On mine (Win 7), \Windows and subdirectories is 19GB, \Program Files is 22GB (half of which is Steam games), and I thought I had a ton of stuff on there, but maybe not…

It ain’t Office or any of your documents that’s gobbling up your space, unless you’re routinely working with huge data sets. On your external, you’re probably filled up the hard drive with pictures (not documents). That’s not hard to do, particularly if you have a high-resolution camera and you don’t discard much. My WAG is that the laptop hard drive is mostly filled with system restore points. Windows “backs up” large portions of the OS on a regular basis, in case you screw things up badly. By default it’ll fill most of the hard drive.

And I’ve been bitten so turning off restore is NOT an option. Also updates take up more and more space. Each time Windows adds one (at least once a month), it usually adds a new restore point and adds more volume to windows. A clean install of windows has a very small footprint but after a year, it’s actually quite large esp if you update like you should. And a clean install of XP would also mean Service pack 3 as well as any available updates still there.

Oh, I know how I filled up my external…bought with that intent in mind. I know I have lots of photos, jpgs and as a result, made sure to NOT store those on my regular hard drive but on an external as well as backing it up elsewhere (those I do not want to lose).

If you run out of space on the system disk you might find that you can’t boot any more. So I wouldn’t advice you to economize too much on the system disk.

Liz

Well I don’t disagree with your larger point that these particular laptops have uncomfortably small hard drives (particularly the 50 gig models). Still, those will fit windows and office without trouble. I’m currently using 120 gig solid state drives on my computers; even without managing Windows’ disk use I have ~50 gigs free on this laptop and ~60 gigs worth of games filling my desktop.