How much should I get?

JackKelly

Hardly the most exciting post unfortunately but I want a few opinions before I do anything.

I'm thinking of selling my laptop to get something ultraportable for college and I want to see what would be a fair price for it.

The laptop is an Acer Aspire 5500 which was bought new around March of this year from acernotebooks.co.uk. AFAIK (and I can't entirely remember) it cost ~1200 new (again ill have to dig up the paperwork) and has never given me a day of trouble. Has a 2.0 Pentium M, 1gb DDR2,100gb HDD,Ati x700,14.1 screen. It does have a fair amount of scuffing on the lid from general wear and tear and the touchpad buttons are also fairly worn but the screen etc is perfect.

Specs

thebman

The best way to get a good price for a laptop is to put a print out of specs with price in the Arts block of a college IMO.

I've seen laptops with terrible specs (not that your laptop has bad specs) going for 600 Euro in colleges because people had no idea what they were buying. Prey on the weak that know nothing about specs or how much your laptop is worth to get a good price. Also foreign students that just want anything to get them by for a year or so will pay a fair bit for a laptop.

Your laptop has fairly nice specs. Have you tried cleaning it to get rid of some of the marks?

The 64 MB of video memory is probably the weakest thing on your console. It might be worth your while to forget putting that up if you are going to advertise in a college as a lot of people will forget or not know to ask and even if they do, half won't understand if that is good or not.

How is it for games do you know? Does it run Quake 4/Doom 3/HL2 (on what settings) etc...

TerrorFirmer

The X700 is quite a good card. Runs BF2142, Quake IV and other recent titles on medium-ish settings. Best to advertise it simply as "Ati Dedicated X700"

JackKelly

Yea, putting a sign up in college isn't a bad idea although I'm not so sure about preying on the weak lol.

Imo, i think i'd be doing well if i got 800 for it. It's only really a thought at the moment now to be honest and if i could find an ultraportable on the cheap i'd hang onto this anyway.

TerrorFirmer

800 is a bit optimistic. The last X700 equiped laptop I saw was in PC World for 899 new - more or less the same spec as yours, maybe I think it was a 1.8 instead of the 2Ghz but it has the benefit of being a new machine...

But again, preying on the weak....you could probably get your 800

I'd say even from someone who knows their stuff, 650 wouldn't be far off.

A good way to advertise it in college would be "Runs CS Source at high settings no problems...", which the X700 is well capable of

I'm actually in the same boat as yourself, trying to sell my midrange gaming core duo lappy to get a philips freevent for college....

JackKelly

lol, 800 was a bit of a ridiculous estimate actually. I'd be happy enough with 650.

Yea,I'm really not a fan of carrying around a 14 inch notebook. Can't imagine how anyone could manage anything bigger. That freevent looks nice. Where are thinking of getting if from?

thebman

I carried around my 15 inch Desktop replacement in college. Its heavy and big but really nice.

chicken_food

Do it timay! A nice small compact laptop makes sense. Just upgraded from my compaq hp nc4010 12" to a macbook 13.1. Its a bit wider than my old one and im missing it already. Having something that you can fit in a a4 folder during colege is such a treat. All id use mine for really is web browsing,presentations (which keynotes is amazing for) and then word processing. I know you'd be doing alot more demanding stuff on urs so keep in mind the smaller they go the more exspensive they seem to get.