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I don’t ask for much in life.
Every so often, a good bottle of wine is nice. Regular time by myself is always beneficial. I get an enormous thrill out of rediscovering bands I used to love years ago - but somehow had completely forgotten about. It feels like travelling back in time, if only for the length of an album or two. And I like to wear shorts for as many months of the year as I possibly can - even though I live in England, where it rains more months of the year than in Seattle.
Is it too much, then, to ask for a laptop that costs less than £200? ($400)
And I’m not even being particularly fussy - I only want a half-decent one.
What does ‘half-decent’ mean?
- It can play YouTube videos
That’s it. That’s what ‘half-decent’ means to me. That is my list.
I don’t care about any of the following:
- The latest and greatest games (or any other type of cutting-edge software)
- Amazing sound quality
- Google Earth
- Dual-Core
Or anything else that requires the most highly-specced piece of equipment currently on the market.
I mean, obviously I’ve got some other requirements too, but they’re all pretty standard. The machine I buy must be able to run a fairly recent but ultimately basic version of Microsoft Office, not go completely loopy when I boot up Photoshop and preferably come with built-in wireless - but even that’s not really important, as I can easily pick up a £10 dongle on eBay that will right that easily enough. You can get a dongle for everything nowadays.
And, ideally, I want it to be powered by Windows XP. Not Vista.
But my benchmark test is simply that it will play videos on YouTube, and play them properly. That’s it. If it does that, I figure it’ll be good enough for everything else I need.
Also, I already own a laptop. Or rather, my wife does. It’s an okayish Acer that we’ve had for a couple of years. It’s fine. It works. It does what it’s supposed to. I’m even writing this blog post on it right now.
But it’s not mine.
I don’t have an enormous amount of money to burn, and so some time ago I set myself a budget of £200. I mean, ideally, I’d buy a Macbook. I really, really want one. But I can’t justify the expense. Yes, I’m well aware that a £699 entry-level Macbook is much better than an equally-priced PC, but £699 is still £699, no matter what you’re buying. I just don’t have it.
So £200 it is. Initially, I assumed I’d have to buy a used laptop, and so planned for that, spending most of the last three months scouring eBay for the greatest piece of equipment my two hundred pounds can buy. Without exaggeration, I have put bids in on about twenty-five machines - Dell, Compaq, IBM, Acer. You name it, and I’ve had a bid on it.
And lost them all.
I have a system on eBay that, despite the above, works for me, and it will work for you too. While eBay is a wondrous invention, it has a darker side that can be damaging both to your psyche and, perhaps more importantly, your wallet: it’s very easy to get addicted.
You know what I mean - you’ve been there. You’re casually looking for something on eBay - maybe a DVD or a book - and, lo and behold, there it is. You put in an offer, and for a while forget about it. A day or two later, you get an email from eBay telling you that you’ve been outbid. You check out the item page again, realise you still want it, and bid a little bit more. Congratulations - you’re top bidder.
Another day passes, and you’re outbid again. Back to the item page. Yeah, you really want it. You raise your bid.
This time, a few hours pass before you’ve been outbid again. You don’t even have to check the item page this time - you know you want it. You raise your bid, but this time quite a bit more than the last. And you realise something else, too - it’s only one other guy you’ve competing against.
I can take him.
Outbid. You counter. You’re high bidder. 47 minutes remaining.
Outbid again. Raise. Outbid. Raise. Outbid. Nine minutes.
You’re there, like a hawk, waiting. He’s there, too - you know it. He’s the current high bidder, but you hold on right until those last few seconds - and then raise the bid massively, winning the auction. Oh wow. That feels fantastic. You sure showed him. Couldn’t put his money with his mouth was!
You pay for the CD, it arrives in the post a few days later, and sits on your shelf for the rest of your life, played only once or twice.
Meantime, the seller has made out like a bandit. Frenzied bidding between two or more people is a dream come true for all sellers. It’s a nightmare for all bidders.
We’ve all done this. What happens is winning the auction becomes more important than the item itself. You get so caught up in the process of beating the other guy that you either completely forget about what you’re actually bidding on or you totally overstate it’s value and importance to you. Winning an auction that has turned into a bidding frenzy triggers an immediate and satisfying high. Five minutes later, when that high has passed, you’ll realise you’ve paid over-the-odds for something that you don’t really care about at all. Welcome to self-loathing.
There is, however, a very easy fix to all this. It’s no great revelation. It’s 100 per cent common sense: whenever you enter any new auction on eBay, make your very first bid the absolute most you would be willing to pay for that item. And then walk away.
That’s it. That’s all it takes. Assuming you enter an auction of sound mind (i.e., sober), that starting point is going to be the time when you are in the best place to make a rational decision. If you tell eBay the most you are willing to pay then, your maximum possible risk is established at the very beginning. You know the worse-case scenario.
If, however, you start off with a casual toe in the water and then find yourself raising your bid in minimal increments each time somebody else gets involved, there’s a very high probability that you’re going to end up paying well above the odds - and far more than you ever would have done back when the auction started - if the bidding starts to really heat up.
Put your high bid in the very first time, then walk away. Ignore the emails. If you get outbid, that’s it. The auction is over for you. You knew what you wanted to pay, and another guy wanted to pay more. That doesn’t matter. What matters is you didn’t end up wiping yourself out for something that will almost certainly be available from half a dozen other sellers at 25-50 per cent less.
Don’t get sucked back in. That way, madness lies.
As I said, it’s a system that works for me, and it will work for you. But there is a drawback - if you really want something, you have to be prepared to really be able to let it go. There’s no halfway house with this system - if you pick and choose when you’re going to get involved in bidding frenzies you’ll always emerge a loser in the long run. But for twenty-five laptops, I found myself getting outbid - often by pennies - time and time again, right at the very end. Mostly by Nigerians. It was extremely frustrating.
Looking back now with the benefit of 20/20, it was inevitably for the best. Most of those laptops weren’t all that great. But after the first ten or so failures, and then each time I lost out on yet another one, I began to ask myself - is this not meant to happen?
I gave up on eBay. The disappointments had become too much to bear. So I started looking elsewhere on the Internet. I wondered, probably aloud, as I was half-mad by now - could one buy a new laptop for less than £200? Did I dare to dream?
Naturally, I ended up at PC World.
I’m not an idiot - I mean, I’m savvy enough to be well aware that PC World is not the smartest place in the world to buy a computer. Yes, they have some good stuff from time to time, and if you’re after some kind of add-on or nominal piece of equipment their range and supply is hard to beat (certainly in the UK), but more often than not if you look around you can find better systems for a cheaper price elsewhere. I know all of this, but still, like a jugular vein to the teeth of a vampire, I was drawn.
And this is where I found out about EI Systems.
EI Systems is, basically, PC World. And as PC World is part of the Dixons group, EI Systems is also Currys, those tiny Metro/Express Dixons/Currys mini-stores, TheTechGuys.com and pretty much anywhere else into which Dixons has greedily dipped one of its eager fingers. You can buy EI Systems laptops at any and all of these places. Go online, and each Dixons sub-store will have them for sale.
And they’re cheap. Very cheap.
For £199, I can pick up an EI System 3102, which gives me the following:
- 1.73GHZ Celeron M Processor
- 512MB Memory
- 40GB Hard Drive
- Windows Vista Basic
The reviews of this model aren’t too bad, either.
I know, I know - Celeron, and Windows Vista. The combination alone is enough to keep me up at night, sweating and panting. My Dual-Core, not-too-bad-thank-you tower at home is less than a year old, came installed with Vista and still hates it. It’s only thanks to Vista’s Readyboost facility that we’ve been able to get the darn thing to run properly at all.
But still, that price for a new laptop - surely it would be worth a punt?
Except that the EI Systems are not new at all. They’re all refurbished models. God only knows what they were before, as I’ve yet to find any EI Systems laptop for sale anywhere else outside of the Dixons Group. And inside that nightmarish place, they’re all refurbished.
But still, I pondered - £199?
I decided to give it some more thought. So, I looked around for alternative options. I considered the Asus Eee PC for a good five minutes or so, but while they’re cute and the size and compactness has some appeal, the 2GB hard-drive and 7-inch display would, I’m quite sure, see me eBaying the thing (and praying for a frenzy) within about six months.
My mind was again settled back on the idea of a used model, and so I started to devour the small pages of local newspapers and websites. I asked friends - the poor ones - how in blue blazes they managed to buy their swanky laptops. I found myself becoming a drifter of secondhand shops, asking endless questions of the clearly baffled shopkeeper (”I’m only looking after the place. The owner is on holiday.”)
Eventually, I stumbled upon a £169 Advent machine from a shop that wasn’t there a week ago that came with most of the things I was looking for, but my wife talked me out of buying it, even though I was convinced I could have grafted the price down to about £130. It even came with a 90-day warranty. She was right, though - as she said, it sounds good now, but when it breaks in two weeks and that shop that wasn’t there a week ago suddenly isn’t there again, I’m stuffed.
So, my hands were tied. It looked like EI Systems or bust. I really didn’t have much of a choice. Yesterday, totally by chance we’d stopped off at our local PC World and, would you believe it, they had an EI Systems machine in stock. Better still, it was the 3103 which, while still a Celeron, has an 80GB drive, but even more incredibly, this demonstration model was powered by XP! I couldn’t believe it. And it was £199.97. Two pence cheaper than the cheapest price I’d found online. Praise the Lord!
Yesterday was, however, a full 24 hours before payday, and like that time each and every month I would have struggled to put the ninety-seven pence together, let alone the rest of it. Because I couldn’t afford a deposit, the lovely technicians at PC World wouldn’t put it aside for me, so I had to wait a full and restless night, and then hurried back early this morning, convinced that it must have been sold.
More luck - it was still there.
I was sold. This was it. Because it was a shop model, all of PC World’s demo software had to be removed from the machine before I would be allowed to take it home. This would take about an hour, they told me. That was fine. I was in no real hurry.
Three months. Three months to find my £200 laptop. Three months of pain, disappointment and sheer frustration. Suddenly, it was all over.
About ten minutes had passed when I was roused from my celebrations by a tap on the shoulder. Somewhat excited as to how quickly that ‘hour’ had passed, I turned to face the store manager.
“I’m afraid,” he said, “There’s been a bit of a problem.”
Apparently, this had happened before. Twice, he told me. When they tried to remove their PC World software and restore the laptop to its factory defaults, it had completely died on them. It was, he said, beyond recovery.
I’m very sorry, he added.
There’s nothing we can do.
My electronic child had died. It was kind of like that bit at the end of A.I., but even more disappointing. Even now, I’m not sure if the manager was being completely honest with me or simply delivering a confused spew of total B.S. - I can’t imagine why they would have had any reason to turn down a sale, but maybe he took it out back, lost the plot and smashed it to smithereens with a hammer - but either way the end result is the same.
I am without laptop.
Worse, I’m being duly mocked for it. I returned home this evening to find a flyer in my hallway from Dell. Now, I’ve done the Dell thing before - they promise these amazing prices in print, but when you get to the website and try to actually buy something at that price, it’s impossible. No matter how much stuff you downgrade or remove you can never get anywhere near the price that they have advertised.
And here’s why - the small print. The number they advertise in flyers, on TV and in magazines is always displayed without value added tax (VAT) and delivery charges. VAT is possibly fair enough - it’s pretty common for big-ticket items to be advertised that way in the media - but when you consider that the delivery charge for a laptop from Dell is £51.07 ($100), and that they then have the flippin’ cheek to charge you VAT on that as well, that number that looked so good ten minutes ago has now increased by about 40 per cent.
And so it went this evening. Dell’s £169, Vostro 1000 laptop with an AMD Sempron, 1024 MB Ram, 80GB drive, DVD/CD-RW Combo Drive and full wireless capabilities becomes a £248 slap-in-the-face after VAT and delivery costs are bolted on.
£60 for shipping. Sixty pounds. How - how - do they get away with that? To deliver their magnificent EI Systems death-machine, PC World charges the grand total of zero. Okay, so they’re probably giving off massive amounts of radiation 24/7, but still. Sixty quid is not only excessive, it’s insulting.
Worse, it’s another Windows Vista monster. To get anything from Dell with XP nowadays, you need to pay for Windows Vista Ultimate (£££s) and then downgrade to XP Professional yourself. Happy days. (And if you fancy doing XP Home yourself, that’ll set you back the same price as the laptop.)
The problem is, I now find myself royally stuffed. I don’t see I have any other choice in the matter. EBay hates me. The used laptop market seems like a dead end. Five minutes out of the box, the EI Systems machine will probably explode and kill everybody within two miles of my house. And I’m not sure my blazing ego could handle whipping out the Eee PC at my local Starbucks. What if somebody was looking?
So it looks like I’ve failed. You can’t buy a half-decent laptop for less than £200. At least, not once VAT and delivery charges have been thrown in.
Even though every single part of my being is screaming out in fury at the thought of paying sixty pounds for somebody to drive a small box down to somewhere they’re probably already going, I’ll be giving Dell a call tomorrow.
Unless somebody - anybody - can help a guy out, make this right, and positively answer this one, simple question:
Can you buy a half-decent laptop for less than £200?
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