Questions about buying/selling used laptops

So, this is a two parter topic.

I bought a used laptop and want to know what are some good ways to test it to make sure it's healthy/in good shape. I know the risk with used hardware, especially computers but I needed a smaller laptop that would be good for heavy productivity/multimedia needs and really didn't want to spend much. Worst case scenario, I can get most of my money back with eBay's protection policy and I got much better specs for less than my budget (Asus, 2nd gen i3, 15" screen, 4GB memory with an open slot, Windows 7) given my limited budget.

I also want to sell my G74. It runs fine, it's just the hard drive I'm worried about. What are the chances someone with enough technical abilities can retrieve stuff from my harddrive, even if I re-format it? I've sold used hardware before, but never a harddrive or something with a harddrive in it.

Prime95 will stress the heck out of it.  I am sure there are others but I always end up going back to the original.

I would use 3D Mark and test the laptop, because it tests nearly everything, video card, cpu, memory and disk.  

Humm I have never trusted buying a laptop via ebay but I've bought used laptops in the past off craigslist and I actually tell them to wait for an hour so I can test everything out.  Usually the 3dMark will find things wrong...most of the time it's battery (wicked short batteries are an issue for me).  

Good luck.  Whatever laptop you get, make sure you switch out to an SSD drive.  you will save a ton of time booting up and using apps, and less battery usage and also a lot less heat than traditional hdd.  - reason, your cpu isn't waiting for the HDD to serve up data so more done faster, less heat all around.

I picked up a Asus A54C but I think I got a decent deal on it, $150 for 2nd gen i3, 4GB ram, 320GB HDD, number pad (actually a big deal for me), LED screen... only real issue the HD 3000 integrated graphics but that was an expected issue. It ran like crap at playing HD videos at first but after installing a clean, basic copy of Windows 7 and updating the drives, it's working out pretty well for me. 

Only thing I'm kinda iffy about is the processor runs at 50C idle and 70C at load. Checked the Intel specs sheet and apparently, I shouldn't worry until it hits 90C but I thought these processors would run cooler. And the other thing: I partitioned the HD, with the main to have 25GB for Windows, and the rest for other shit... and the main is already 23GB full. I'm gonna have to reinstall everything unless I can find a way to copy the Windows install to another HD, change the partition sizes, and then copy everything back.

Vinny said:

I also want to sell my G74. It runs fine, it's just the hard drive I'm worried about. What are the chances someone with enough technical abilities can retrieve stuff from my harddrive, even if I re-format it? I've sold used hardware before, but never a harddrive or something with a harddrive in it.

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Do you have access to a mac? Able to put the laptop HD into a USB case and attach it to a mac? If so you can use the built in Disk utility to secure format the drive. It writes random ones and zeros to the entire drive, if you are extra paranoid you can have it do 7 or 35 passes of the same. Even after one pass is probably well beyond any end-users' capability to recover the previous information.

Or probably the easier route is to find a windows freeware utility that will do the same . I am sure they are around I just don't know of any specific ones.

Ruahrc said:

Do you have access to a mac? Able to put the laptop HD into a USB case and attach it to a mac? If so you can use the built in Disk utility to secure format the drive. It writes random ones and zeros to the entire drive, if you are extra paranoid you can have it do 7 or 35 passes of the same. Even after one pass is probably well beyond any end-users' capability to recover the previous information.

Or probably the easier route is to find a windows freeware utility that will do the same . I am sure they are around I just don't know of any specific ones.

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Yeah, I actually found a few Windows apps that'll do the same thing.

Now I'm actually more worried about someone buying it and then trying to screw me over saying it doesn't work.