The great second-user laptop swindle

YOU KNOW THE STORY, you're almost certainly the family computer expert. So whenever a friend needs a new computer, guess who gets asked? It's the same here. It came as no surprise a few weeks ago to be plied with a bottle of wine and asked to scout out a cheap laptop for someone. And there the odyssey begins.

Unless you want to be hip to the latest re-marketing attempts and call them notebooks, laptops are just laptops, right? You'd think the choice would be fairly simple, just find out what tasks it needs to perform and go from there. Except that this was for someone who couldn't afford much. It was almost certainly going to have to be a second-hand machine.

The requirements were simple enough: word processing, a good keyboard, decent battery life and reasonable screen. The first thing to do was the obvious one, a quick Google for "cheap laptops uk" seemed in order. Sure enough, not only a good selection of results but plenty of advertisers too. Poking around the stock of a few firms soon gave an idea of where things were headed.

One of the most popular machines up for sale was the IBM Thinkpad 600E: a reasonably modern machine with good build quality and an excellent keyboard. It has a P2-366 processor which should be fine for word-processing and a decent sized 13.3" XGA TFT screen. All good so far. Basic unit cost, to you guv, £399... But that doesn't include the operating system. Add on an extra £50 or so to cover that cost.

It seemed an OK price. It was only a few months ago that a friend had spent more than a grand on a new Sony. But, believe it or not, that £399 is a scam. It is abuse on an outrageous scale. A quick trip over to eBay and the prices people are paying for a laptop become ridiculous. Worst still, at the start of this odyssey, this family computer expert had no idea. Had it not been for one firm running adverts in the national press, a horrible mistake could have been made.

That firm was Fujitsu-Siemens. The way it managed to do this was simple: it published the retail price of its C1020s laptop. That's a Celeron 1.5GHz machine with a 14.1" screen and Windows XP for £499 inc. VAT. A day later and HP adverts were shining a light on the festering little swindle market that is used laptops. It has an Athlon XP1700 machine for £540 inc. VAT.

The obvious thing here is that, in some parts of the market at least, laptops have become commodities. Where once they were luxury items only affordable to deep corporate pockets, now you can pick up a brand new one for five hundred notes.

That price point is something of a milestone. The Fujitsu-Siemens is pretty well equipped for the price too. Where buying the second-hand IBM would have meant finding a PCMCIA modem/LAN card, usually another £35, the Fujitsu-Siemens has modem and LAN built in. It has Firewire and S-Video out. It has a battery that hasn't been subjected to unknown rigours. Best of all, it has a real warranty.

It doesn't take much to figure out that a P2-366 machine with an uncertain history for 80% of the price of a brand new 1.5GHz Celeron is less than a bargain. Especially when you consider that the component that is most difficult to assess is the battery. Batteries only have a certain number of recharges in them.

If you happen to buy a second-hand machine and the battery is close to giving up the ghost, tough. Check the small print on any of the resellers and you'll find that the battery isn't covered under the warranty or, if it is, that it's only for 30 days or something like that. The reason why the resellers are so stingy with the battery warranty is how much they cost to replace. Most new replacement batteries are around £100.

What you end up with after looking around for a while is the idea that there are plenty of companies that have been making hay while the sun shines. Or, to be more precise, fleecing customers while they are still unsuspecting.

Customers need to beware big time. Thinking just six months into the future, it's obvious that laptop prices are going to plummet in general. There are many reasons for it; AMD providing Intel with some good competition in the mobile arena, TFT screens nose-diving in price, integrated chipsets providing all of the required technology, etc. We are now at the point that major manufacturers will be regularly turning out decently specified machines for less than £500.

Where does that leave the people who are trying to sell Pentium 120 laptops with 24MB of RAM for £200? They will probably still sell more machines to the unsuspecting. Let's just hope that the number of people caught stays at a minimum. At the very least, let's hope that second-hand machines drop to a more reasonable price. µ