For the past 18 hours since I wrote this entry, I've been the proud owner of a "professionally refurbished" IBM Thinkpad Laptop that doesn't work.
Here's the story: I'm in college, and I'm already tired of taking notes in class. Being a computer science major, It's especially frustrating to have to erase and rewrite code by hand. So I considered getting a laptop for taking notes in classes. I'll admit it was also partially peer influence; my roommate, Huan, has an excellent Averatec laptop that he brings to classes and many of the other people on the hall have laptops as well, whether they're a supplement to or a replacement for a desktop.
I had looked online at the price of laptops from all the major brands previously -- HP, Compaq, Dell, IBM, Gateway, even the Apple iBooks and PowerBooks. The cheapest were $750 -- I wasn't willing to spend quite that much on something that wasn't top-of-the-line. A google search for "cheap laptops" later and I find USANotebook.com. They look reputable, the notebooks they sell, while used, or, in their words, professionally refurbished, are cheaper than a brand new laptop preloaded with a lot of crap I don't need, and they've gotten a lot of cutomer satisfaction.
Eventually I found the perfect model: an IBM ThinkPad T21, with a Pentium III 800MHz, 256 MB RAM, and 20 GB hard drive, preloaded with Windows 2000, weighing only 5.3 pounds -- less than my calculus textbook, to be sure. Seeing as how I'd probably only use it for note-taking, I wouldn't need a lot of power, so this laptop would fit my needs perfectly. Taking advantage of the 5% student discount they offered, the laptop would cost about $600 plus shipping. Fine.
I already had the advanced system I was building planned out: After I got the laptop, I would purchase a docking station, ethernet hub, and KVM switch from some other discount online retailers, so that all I'd need to do after class is drop the laptop into the docking station and a few keypresses later I'd be viewing my laptop on my 19" CRT and using my own keyboard and mouse rather than the laptop keyboard and that annoying IBM trackpoint. And finally, Huan offered to sell me a wireless card for $10. So with visions of peripherals like these dancing in my head, I waited anxiously for Friday to come.
I got the laptop today. It starts up -- and then starts randomly rebooting, even while in the BIOS. When it doesn't reboot, sometimes the keyboard and trackpoint stop working, or else it just freezes. It's not a battery issue, Huan tried it with only AC power and the problem still exists. After a conference with some of my dormmates, computer geeks all, we determined that it was probably not a software issue.
So I'll be sending it in for a refund. I'll still be getting a laptop, but now I'll probably ignore the resellers and go straight for a brand new IBM, Dell, HP etc. Let this be a word of warning: stay away from USANotebook.com.
That's my story. Ever been swindled like this? I want to hear from you!