Hi,I'm looking at buying a 3 yr old Dell laptop off lease from a local college.
Specs:Latitude C600,P3,600MHz,128mb ram,10GB hard drive,Cd and floppy drives.
What I'd like too use it for is, while my son or wife are using the desktop PC I could still get on the internet as well as connect to the Empeg and send files, etc to it from the desktop PC.
Oh yeah the price is 450$ Is it worth it assuming it's in decent shape.It does come with a carrying case too.

Well, those specs are better than the machine I used for Hijack development up until recently. My newer used laptop has 512MB and a P3-850 now. The older one is still way faster than my 3mb/s internet connection, and is still used for tons of odd jobs here.

I agree it is capable of handling my needs.Just wondering if the price is fair or not.They have over 100 of these for sale

Make sure you can still get a battery for it. Odds are that if it saw quite a bit of battery usage, the one that comes with it probably won't power the system all that long.

I just bought a new battery for my Powerbook before my Europe trip, as the first one has already lost 40% of it's capacity since last September. From the number of times I discharged then recharged it, it actually held out pretty well. My mothers laptop on the other hand has seen very little degration, as she rarley uses the battery.

128M and 10G are a bit thin these days.
My experience with laptops is that the power systems are what fail.

I suspect that would depend heavily upon the brand. I only have experience with four notebook computers here:

IBM A21p -- battery still fine after several years usage, mostly on mains.

Dell Inspiron 3500 -- battery still fine after many many years, almost entirely on mains.

Dell Latitude C850 -- battery still fine after a few years usage, mostly on mains.

Toshiba 5000 -- battery croaked early on, got replaced, unit got sold.

Cheers

Sometimes it's just the luck of the draw.

I have an Apple Wallstreet at work and another at home. The work unit has had no charging or battery life problems. The home unit runs twice has hot has cooked 2 batteries & 1 wall wart, and the power jack had to be resoldered to the motherboard. I'd part with it cheaply.

Quote:
128M and 10G are a bit thin these days.

Don't quite understand what that means

Quote:
My experience with laptops is that the power systems are what fail.

Do you mean the battery?

Numbers are from your first post, ram and disk space. I've been using a borrowed sony sr33k the last few months. The specs match pretty closely. Using it primarily for web browsing. But with all the incidental software loaded it was getting tight on the disk drive. I also dropped some ram that I scavenged into it.

My experience is that the batteries fail because there is something wrong with the charging circuts. Either poor design or something failed. Laptops are so tightly integrated that when something like that fails it isn't much worth fixing unless you have the skills to do it your self.

The last machine I had that failed was a kds valient. About 18mos ago I picked it up at an Office Max branch closing. ( bad location ) I couldn't resist the closout price of $850. That laptop was jinxed. Just before the warrenty was up the backlight electronics died. That was repaired under warrenty. The battery had been steadly loosing capacity. Then one day there was a flicker and everything went dead. I pulled the hard drive and put the rest into the spare parts bin.
I think my next one is going to be a sony. I'm kind of impressed with the loaner I've been using.

Lest I give everyon the impression that I've had nothing but trouble. I have a couple of paperweights that still boot and run, slowly. One runs windows 3.11 @ 25 ghz.

Used to be. In a world that ran 4-8ghz. Poor b@stards.

Except for the 8" screen it was neatly designed. Keyboard was all the way forward, and the display base slid forward as it was raised with a back brace unfolding. Laptops at that time had a real problem with hinges slipping. Gave it a minimal footprint to boot. Has a track ball in the LR corner of the display bezel with buttons in both lower corners. The only thing that prevented it from being as small as some of todays machines was the relative thickness of all the components.

For reference, I picked up a Compaq M700, 550MHz P3, 256MB RAM, 12GB HD and DVD drive for $550 about 3 years ago. Admittedly that was at auction and during the peak of the dotBust era when there was a lot of stuff being auctioned in Boston (ie buyers market).

For the intended use you've described, 10GB HD and 128MB of RAM should be ok. I'd prefer to see 256MB of RAM and 20GB of disk space though. What OS are you intending to run on it?

Umm. I think you've missed my point

You keep mentioning GHz instead of MHz. Only now are we reaching 3-4GHz...

It has 98se loaded but I would probably put 2000 on it.
No DVD drive either.
So do you think its too much money with those specs?

25ghz

yep its a slip of the toung on that one.

I'm thinking yes. My only other point of reference is ebay. Obviously you have to be careful with ebay, but I am seeing laptops with 256MB+ RAM and DVD players in a search of laptops in the $400-$500 (Buy It Now) range. Many of the vendors are offering some form of limited warranty too. (You didn't mention if your current source does or not. As with all warranties - read the fine print).

Oh boy,I just looked on Ebay and now i'm more confused at all the choices of brands features etc.
This is going to be harder than I thought.