I bought a laptop on ebay

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Hi

I just bought a laptop on ebay I paid 270$C for an IBM
thinkpad P4 2.0ghz , it got 256 meg ram not that much
but I can add memory up to 1gig

I think it's a good bargin for a p4 laptop. but I don't know much about Ibm laptop. it's will help me doing more programing when my gf is gone sleeping.

I hope the laptop meets your needs. Personally, I wouldn't take the risk of buying a computer from Ebay.

I don't want to play game with it .. just programing
and surf on the web.

I bought a few thing on ebay like camera etc.. never had problem. even if the hard disk have bad sector I can change it

Congratulations. Really a bargain. What was the original price? Ebay may be ok, but the delivery is a bit risky IMHO. Additionally, I have to pay import taxes for everything that isn't a gift. Noless, 270$ is good.

I pay only the shipping and the tax, final price including shipping and tax is 327$ there was no reserve on it so I think it's start at 0$

I saw other laptop P3 at $400 and more, there a program that allow you to be a snipper that increase the chance to have items at much lower price

Did you use escrow?

"paying for" a laptop and "receiving" a laptop unfortunately aren't always one and the same on these online auctions...

Not to make you paranoid, but laptops are among the more popular items 'sold' by frauds on ebay.

(I'm sure you've seen those fake phishing scams going by, which pretend to be from ebay, asking you to 'update yourt account information'. Some enterprising individuals collect login info for 'good' accounts that way, and abuse 'em to sell expensive popular items such as a laptop from a random account with a good rating. Before anyone realizes what happened, the 'seller' is long gone.)

Personally I'd stay away from laptop auctions, you never know. :-? But I do hope that this was a legit one, and you'll be happily enjoying a great laptop soon.

but I don't know much about Ibm laptop.


The biggest distinguising feature of IBM laptop's vs. every other laptop, is that the IBM's don't have a touchpad but use those annoying tracksticks to control the mousepointer (that little red eraser-head looking thingey in the middle of the keypad, instead of the flat surface you can move your finger around on. Some people love them, others can't stand them. Of course you can always hook up an external mouse or trackball to your liking.)

Also, expect the video card to be absolute crap, but that goes for pretty much any laptop other than those advertised specifically for gamers. They tend to be a lot slower and less advanced than regular computer video adapters, to reduce cost, heat, and reduce power consumption/extend battery life... It does mean that games tend to run noticably worse than on a desktop system. Same goes unfortunately for 3D programming such as Blitz3D and BlitzMax (which does 2D-in-3D). But it may be sufficient for what you want to do anyway.

hmm my wife just recently got an IBM laptop and it has both a touchpad and the little stick thingy plus some other weird stuff. My problem with it is I couldn't find the windows key which I use all the time to open explorer etc.

Fine for B3D, not so good for shader intensive games, has some kind of Radeon X something or other.

I don't like the little stick too , even the touch pad, but I have a small usb mouse that I will use most of the time. I have windows XP home on this computer maybe I can install on the laptop also.