List your personal "general Guidelines" when buying used laptops

[Fried.Bacon]

Hi guys! would appreciate if you can provide your own personal "general guidelines" if ever your opting to buy used laptops. 

Here's mine:

1. Able to meet-up with the seller and check the laptop itself (Check that the laptop turns on, check the BIOS and OS and such).

2. Able to open the internals and check the hardware (check the state of the RAM, CPU, GPU and other hardware; check if they need cleaning  and/or replacement of thermal paste/pads, and checking if its even possible to replace those)

3. Replace the drive with a new one (once bought; replace it with a new drive)

 

[bellabichon]

I'd add:

4. Able to run a CPU stress test like Aida64 to determine just how bad the overheating is. On gaming laptops, overheating is almost a given to some degree, but there's a big difference between 'the palm rest gets kinda warm under load' and 'there is now a 737 taking off inside my living room'. 

[Fried.Bacon]

Just now, bellabichon said:

I'd add:

4. Able to run a CPU stress test like Aida64 to determine just how bad the overheating is. On gaming laptops, overheating is almost a given to some degree, but there's a big difference between 'the palm rest gets kinda warm under load' and 'there is now a 737 taking off inside my living room'. 

Oh yeah, totally forgot about that, thanks man. That's a great input. 

[Vishera]

CPU: 1 hour of Prime95 Small FFTs

RAM: 3 hours of Memtest 86

GPU: GPUPI 3.3.3 with the following settings:

32B HWbot GPU

OpenCL

Batch size: 20M

Reduction size: 512

 

Visual inspection of the insides and outside

Video of the machine in operation to look for problems especially with the display,track pad,camera and keyboard.

[NineEyeRon]

1. Go to reputable selling site

2. Buy laptop.

 

[LogicalDrm]

-> Moved to Laptops and Pre-Built Systems

[LloydLynx]

The biggest, absolutely most important thing for me, is Linux compatibility. It's surprisingly difficult to verify a laptop without being able to trial it in person yourself for a week or more. That's why I'm squeezing as much life out of my ASUS K53e as possible, even going as far as to do solder work on the board to keep the old clunker running properly.

I did try to get a new laptop a couple years ago, an Acer Aspire E15. Everything looked great during online research, that model was even in an article about best laptops for Linux! To prevent a wall of text, lets just say that thing didn't meet expectations, at all.