Refurbished laptops

[isup]

Is it safe to buy refurbished laptops? Looking for laptop under $700 for school work. What's a good one especially Dell? Is a DVD writer essential

[johnnyis42]

My take on refurb laptops is that it depends on the warranty. There are plenty of new laptops out there in your price range as well. Read the reviews (MORE THAN ONE!!!) on the laptops you're considering, compare features/prices, go from there.

The thing I hate most about buying laptops is that the proprietary nature they impose on the OEM, development and support starts slowing down from the time they release the product. You're lucky to see a BIOS or driver update for them 2 years after purchase, unless the problem that needs to be resolved results in the laptop not functioning at all in some capacity (in the event of many wireless drivers after XPSP2) or the machine completely crashing. Nothing much you can do about that, though. Sometimes you get lucky and there are laptop driver projects out there, but usually only for video. Sometimes there are hardware manufacturer drivers for your laptop, but usually those drivers are only supplied to the OEM's directly.

[pianowizard]

Originally Posted by isup

Is it safe to buy refurbished laptops? Looking for laptop under $700 for school work. What's a good one especially Dell? Is a DVD writer essential

What are you going to use the laptop for? Does school work mean mainly Microsoft Office, email and Internet Explorer? If so, a cheap, used (not even refurbished) Pentium III laptop with 512MB RAM would suffice. You should also get something relatively light. A nice IBM Thinkpad T23 (about 5.2 lbs) with a 1400x1050 display and 30GB HDD can be had for under $300 on eBay. Just make sure you read the seller's feedback history.

Regarding whether a DVD writer is essential, only you can answer that question!