I recently bought one for about 6000. Had to ditch everything except for the case, cd rewriter and monitor when the hard disk died. The pc company I took it to, couldn’t reinstall the software on the AMD Chip K7/500 (I think) so I ended up gutting the entire system.
I love what I have now… but it wasn’t cheap getting there! Still I run Win98 SE on P4 chip with 256MB RAM. You know, it seems a lot more stable than the old system even my old PII with 320MB ram. Odd eh?
By the time I bought the lot, I could have had a completely new system… So what do you guys think?
One thing, I noticed that pc owners who are selling their used pcs almost always overvalue their second hand pcs, in some cases GROSSLY. I would depreciate a new pc at about 50% per year as a standard. Even six months, I would expect a reasonable discount to the price.
Any opinions/experience that you want to share about this?
The U.S. IRS assumes a 33.3% depreciation per year for businesses deducting equipment costs on their taxes.
A few years ago, it was still probably worth buying used PCs, but considering that (at least in the U.S.) you can buy a completely new just-below-the-high-end system for about US$500 (no monitor), it really isn’t any more. Except maybe laptops, but even there, it’s hard to find a decent deal (especially when the new laptops have so many more features).
That NT$6000 would have bought a brand-new 48X CDRW drive and a good new case/ps, so figure that you got the monitor free (assuming that these items were in good shape and reasonably new).
BTW, as far as experiences, I bought someone’s used PC a few years ago. He’d deleted all of his personal files, but they’re resurrectable as long as you don’t put any new stuff on the drive first.
I didn’t undelete anything, but I looked at the filenames. Yow. What a pornhound!
I would never sell a hard drive with the PC. I destroy all of my old no-longer-useful drives. Even reformatting still leaves the information available if someone REALLY wants to work to get it.
I’ve been looking at buying a 2nd hand PC, but cost is the number one reason not to. I need a system dedicated to Kazaalite, with a CD burner and USB port. It would cost me more to buy a 2nd hand computer from the 2nd hand computer shops than to just build a better system myself.
I’d say just build it or get friends to help you build it. I would also destroy any of my previous hard drives depending on what I used the computer for.
I have noticed on some boards that the same people keep trying to sell their old pcs. It’s an old pentium for 2000 or so. He seems unable even to give it away.
But ditto about the hard drives. I took a look at the old drive before it crashed. The previous owner had obviously spent time deleting stuff. I took a look at the hard disk size, and couldn’t figure out why it was taking up nearly 3 or four times the space it should have.
Then i started looking for stuff. I found 2 years worth of old emails still there, and still accessible; webpages, caches full of stuff, etc. And I’m a non expert in this area.
Once I had deleted everything, I was quite shocked to find out how much I had to delete from the drive.
If you value your privacy, never sell your hard disk, even broken ones.
I generally don’t buy second hand components because:
1)The prices aren’t that good (if they are, that’s fishy)
2)You never really know why it’s being sold(abused, fried, stolen, etc)
3)Why buy when you can just trade with friends?
Especially hard drives. I’ve only bought refurbished or overstock SCSI hard drives. I would NEVER buy a used drive.
Laptops too. Big no-no to buy used unless you’re willing to take the risk that it’ll die on you.
At the point where a 1Ghz+ dirt cheap computer (without monitor) can be put together for 7000NT, it’s pretty pointless to pay for anything more than 6 months old with questionable origins
