A few weeks ago, someone posted a Toshiba L675 on Facebook for $80.
Said it wouldn’t boot.
I took a chance and bought it. When I got it, I looked it over and it was like new. No scratches or marks on it anywhere. Still had the labels on the bottom of the keyboard.
I tinkered around and found that the keyboard had been disconnected. Fixed that, but the HD was shot.
Pulled an old HD out of the drawer, put it in, and installed Linux Mint on it.
It purrs like a kitten. Wireless works, DVD/Blu Ray works, graphics work, card reader works. Monitor is nice and bright. Even the battery will hold an hour and a half charge. Its almost as good as the laptop I currently have.
Now, I have two laptops. Don’t know what I’m going to do with the spare, but it was too good to pass up.
Save the spare! You never know when your primary will die.
Just put it on the charger every two months or so to keep the battery ok.
I bought an eight year old Apple PowerBook 150 at a garage sale for $10 because the seller said it didn't work. Brought it home and found they were right. The HD was toast. Bought a used 40 MB SCSI HD, and a new battery to drop in it for $60, installed MacOS 7.5 and got it working. Total out of pocket $70. Several years later it was stolen in a burglary. i duly reported the above facts to my homeowners' insurance company with an estimated loss value of $50. After all, it was about 13 years old when it got stolen!
Three weeks later I got home from work to find a largish box in the entry way. I asked my wife what it was. She said it was from the insurance company. I opened it to find a box from Apple inside. My Insurance company had purchased a brand new, top-of-the-line $2500 Apple PowerBook G4 to replace my $10 garage sale junker. . .
I used that PowerBook G4 for five years, until one day I heard my car alarm going off. Someone had clouted my car. I had my PowerBook G4 in the trunk of my car and some @#*%$#@ had punched out my lock on the trunk and stolen a tool kit and my briefcase with my laptop in it. . . I called my auto insurance and they would cover the TOOL KIT, but not the laptop! They said try your homeowners. My homeowners' insurance agreed it was covered under my comprehensive theft insurance and after a $500 deductible, they paid for another top of the line Intel based Apple MacBook Pro. . . that junker Powerbook 100, with the inadvertent help of two crooks, was the best $10 I ever spent!
Fast forward four years, and my Macbook pro was languishing because I was using my iPad for everything during business travel. A fledgling business partner asked if she could borrow it for use in the house cleaning business she was getting off the ground, in which I was a silent minority partner (she'd been my housekeeper), after her PC died. Six months later, the business was gone, as was she. . . and my laptop, and all vestiges of my minor investment in her venture, not to be heard from again. Luckily it was a small investment. Alas, I could not make an insurance claim for a business loss. Too bad.