New or Used?

I've always been a fan of the ThinkPad series of notebooks. Though I've heard people slag the little red button that acts as a mouse, I found that it had much better performance than any touchpad I tried. Out of curiousity I checked out the prices on Lenovo's (IBM sold the Thinkpad division to Lenovo) Thinkpads and was surprised to find them quite high, almost double what I bought my 1GHz Compaq Armada E500 notebook for.

My notebook was "refurbished," but I should note that the trackpad on the notebook didn't have ANY wear, there were no always on or always off pixels, it was in pristine condition when I bought it for $799CDN. Now the ThinkPads have more RAM, better video, but I'm not convinced the features are good enough to justify the almost double price, especially with other notebook makers (Dell) releasing sub-$800 CDN notebooks. And my notebook is now almost 1 year old since I bought it, surely the price has dropped at least $100 by now. The hard drive difference between mine and the ThankPad R51 is a measily 10GB. I manage to get by with less than half of that.

Buying used is a tricky business, one that can be difficult because there are so many things to watch for. When I went shopping for my notebook I brought along a Knoppix 3.7 CD (Ubuntu hadn't really exploded on the scene yet). The first store I went to, a dedicated used notebook store, refused to let me boot the Knoppix CD because of "boot viruses." I tried to explain that I'd burned the CD under Fedora Core, and that there was a zero chance of having a boot virus, but ignorance and fear kept him from trusting me. It ended up being fine because had he said yes I might have settled for one of the machines in this shop, all of which had a dead pixel, or always on pixel, somewhere on the screens. These "broken" machines were priced as high as machines I looked at elsewhere which didn't have problems.

I visited a few other places, finally ending up at a shop where the only salesperson a little reluctantly let me boot the Knoppix CD from the notebook and play with it for about 20 minutes. The Knoppix CD found the NIC, ran in 1024x768 (later I learned I could run in 1400x1050), and found everything except for the Lucent winmodem, which I later found out was supported, but not a part of most Linux distributions. I bought the Armada E500 (which has a few variants, mine happens to be the top end of that line) and I've been using it with few problems since.