Should I buy a pIII IBM Thinkpad for $225?

[RavUn]

I've been wanting to buy a real cheap laptop for a while. Someone in class says he will sell me his pentium III IBM Thinkpad for $225. It has 320 MB RAM, 1Ghz processor, and DVD-Rom.

Is $225 for this a good deal?

[zekopeko]

no. for 299$ you can get a one of those mini laptops with twice the speed.

[RavUn]

Are you talking about the Asus EEE? The 2gb one is $299 and, from what I read, there's not much you can do with it. If it's possible for me to use a flash drive as a hard drive then it'd be pretty good... I'll have to look into it.

I looked into the Asus EEE sub-notebooks for a while and everyone seems to love them. The 4gb and higher is what everyone recommends unless you just want to browse the web.

[zmjjmz]

Yes, you should.
I have a Thinkpad T20 with 384MB RAM, a 733MHz PIII, and a 12GB HDD. With the DWL-G650 (available from Amazon for like 13$) it has wifi too.
EDIT: It runs Dreamlinux quite nicely, and is capapble of watching youtube vids.
Only problem: No 3D accel.

[chalewa]

yea i would probably do it, thinkpads are pretty good laptops

[gn2]

I've been wanting to buy a real cheap laptop for a while. Someone in class says he will sell me his pentium III IBM Thinkpad for $225. It has 320 MB RAM, 1Ghz processor, and DVD-Rom.

Is $225 for this a good deal?

On a straight conversion to UK currency and comparing that with the market for laptops here, if you trust that it's in good working order, I would advise you take it.
But see if you can knock him down to $210, every little helps. ;)

[arsenic23]

A fair price for something like that would be $125 - $195 .


Personally I wouldn't pay over $100.

[madjr]

A fair price for something like that would be $125 - $195 .


Personally I wouldn't pay over $100.

exactly, those mini laptops are new and this thing could die on you at any moment

get something with guarantee

[timcredible]

i wouldn't buy it. maybe $100US, but that slow, low-memory, of a machine isn't going to be able to do much.

[gn2]

i wouldn't buy it. maybe $100US, but that slow, low-memory, of a machine isn't going to be able to do much.

You would be surprised.
It will do all that one of the current breed of shiny new netbooks will do and more because it has an optical drive.

My P3 laptop with 500mhz and 192 mb of RAM will run Frostwire, Firefox and Audacious all at the same time and that's a much lower spec than the laptop the OP is considering.

[kevinatkins]

It seems a little bit expensive to me but performance-wise, it should be adequate for basic computing. Thinkpads are very well-engineered machines, nicely made, so I wouldn't write it off completely. Just don't pay the asking price - $150 would be plenty enough.

[Jim!]

Well If you buy the laptop what do you even want to use it for? I also think $225 is just a little too much...$200, maybe...

[kerry_s]

i only paid a $100 for a thinkpad t20, i would not pay more than that for the older ibm's. you need to look the model up on line, a lot of them have problems with memory and overheating, due to poor design.

mine had the memory problem, dead slot, i had to dismantle and resolder.