Learning the "Zen" of buying things
As a person visiting this website/forum, you may or may not have experience buying items at auction - but it is likely that you have at least once purchased something in your life. This post is intended to "chill you out" a bit, get you using your head, not thinking like your wallet is on fire, or that
"I NEED THAT THING NOW!!!" 
.
In survival, there is the concept of "the rules of three":
- 3 minutes without air
- 3 hours without shelter
- 3 days without water
- 3 weeks without food.
Take a moment an look there where they have Military Vehicles listed, and ToughBooks - nowhere. I consider the above rules of three as "
needs", anything outside of the above list is a "
want". Wants can wait, so patience is the name of the game.
Take these two hypothetical machines:
1) CF-30 Mk2, Boots to BIOS (unlocked), 4GB memory, no hard drive caddy or hard drive, has battery, missing a few keys, has power pack, all plastics in good shape. Price: $75
2) CF-30 Mk2, BIOS Locked, 2GB memory, has 60GB hard drive and caddy, missing battery and power pack, keyboard has all keys, scratched screen. Price: $75
Which one is the better buy? In this case, the BIOS being locked on #2 means the system won't boot to an OS do to a security setting that wasn't wiped by the previous owner. That's a red flag. #1 is going to need a hard drive caddy, you can't install a hard drive without one in these do to connector incompatibility, and a new keyboard. The great news on #1 is that the case is in good shape and it boots - that's a big deal. So is the functioning screen/backlight, if the listing or ad has a picture of the machine in the BIOS screen that's a win for you because it tells you a few things (here's just a random one I'm grabbing from eplace):
I have arrows pointing to most important details you'd see, but here they are again:
- The system boots!!! It's obvious that the system will at least function in the basic form if you see this screen, usually if there is something horribly wrong with the platform, it can't get this far.
- The screen works!!! People look at computers so much during their day that this obvious data-point can be missed. There is no obvious problems with this screen, and the back-light looks to be working well.
- Now we can look at some good stuff:
- There is no Hard Drive installed. Watch out for this, it is the security policy of many government agencies to remove and shred hard drives for security reasons. There is no other way to guarantee the security of the data to this level (total physical destruction). UNFORTUNATELY... most computer techs are so pressed for time (doing literally 100's of these often), they don't bother to remove the drive form the $50-120 hard drive caddy. This will cost you later if you have to buy them - cheap ones are available from China, but they don't often have the heater sleeve which makes it possible to boot at lower than freezing temperatures - that can be another $50 or more...
- There IS a DVD-ROM installed!! These can cost you between $20-75, depending on how patient you are an how impatient the seller is. If your plans include playing DVDs on the road, or installing software outside the home, this is a killer option to have.
- There is only 1GB of memory installed. This will be a problem if you want to run a moderately modern version of Windows (i.e. Win 7) - some Linux versions can tollerate memory this small, but remember the analogy of the hoarder...
- The chipset is L2400. For the non-computer person this will likely mean less than zero to you. For the computer person, this is something you can put into Google search, and one of the earlier hits is the actual Intel product page. These pages have nice things like Intel Technical datasheets, which if you read them tell you what the chipset and CPU can do, not just what Panasonic advertises it is intended to do. This is where we find nice nuggets like the Mk2 and Mk3 CF-30 chipsets (L7500, and L9300 respectively) can support up to 8GB of RAM, whereas Panasonic says the max is 4GB - they even mention this in the BIOS screen when you install more than 3GB that a 32-bit system will only be able to use 3.5GB. This is a broadly known limit of 32-bit OS'es, and if you're installing a 64-bit OS on a compatible machine (one which can run 64-bit software) the limit doesn't apply!
- The full model number. There is a sticker on the bottom of the machine which has this information, but getting a screenshot of the BIOS is much more informative in a single picture. You can do a search for a CF-30 model decoder, and there is more that one resource which will help you figure out exactly how this machine was configured by the factory. This is very helpful if the person listing the machine has no idea what they have, or is more secretarial than technical. We would see that this pictured machine is a Mk1 (L2400) with WiFi, 500-nit (half sunlight readable) non-touchscreen, 80GB HDD 1GB RAM, no BlueTooth, no GPS, no WWAN (celluar modem), Windows XP, for the North American market.
- Accumulated Hours on the machine (and so also by association the back-light). In this example, the machine only has 1430 hours on a Mk1. They started selling the Mark 1 in late 2010 - so that's about four years, or about 4-hours of use a day every day. VERY light usage - anything under 5,000 hours is "light", 5K-15K is "moderate", >15K is "heavy" to "very heavy", I have seen MK2 (2011) machines with over 25K hours on them. That's a lot of hours, especially considering that you can usually expect at most only 30K hours on the back-light before it fails.
Now take these two hypothetical machines:
- Mk2, good shape, BIOS picture in ad, Buy It Now $75 Free shipping
- Mk2, good shape, BIOS picture in ad, current bid $50 + $15 shipping (next bid $50.50)
I'm not going to tell anyone what to do in this case, but in my opinion the Buy It Now serves the "want it now" mentality. One might read the "free shipping" as a great deal versus the $15 for the other one, but do the math here - $75 is not cheaper than $65. If you're patient and the other bidders (if there are any) are maxed out, wouldn't it be interesting to put a bid on the $65 one and have the $75 one as a backup if the bidding one goes to $75.01? Even with added shipping you could be saving $10 on the total purchase. Of course you would have to look carefully at each add, I have only rarely seen two machines that close - there are usually other factors that drive price (obviously condition and included components being the major one), imagine saving that $10 then getting the until and finding out the seller listed it as no battery, but it came with one. Little price savings here and there can actually end up saving your bacon later - for example buying a hard drive at $55 vs $85 could save you the cost of a power pack...
Ahh so.. but now we get into the ZEN part of buying, and that is the state of mind when bidding.
I like to set a budget once I get my specifications, then try to buy to that budget. I try for a while to buy at that budget, and this can mean going without whatever it is I want to buy for a while. As an example, I wanted a computer workstation at home with dual Intel XEON X5690 CPUs - but I wanted to pay $500 or less for both of them. MSRP when new for these was $2500
EACH - so I had to wait a while. Just a few weeks ago, I bought a
pair for $350. It just took two years of patience before the price matched my budget. The same can be said for ToughBooks and other things, patience on your as the buyer end can in some cases find you looking at the desperation of others to sell. This is in general the case with these ToughBooks we are looking at now. Most of these have been bought by liquidators or surplus companies where it's either "sell to someone who can use it, or send to scrap". They take in tens if not hundreds of these at a time, and have to either turn them around quickly for some cash or just get rid of them at scrap value.
In this sense you can see that it's not that unlike what we see with military vehicles!!
Don't get swept up in the heat of bidding. If you find "that machine" that fits all of your needs, I'll go ahead and wager that it matches a whole bunch of other people's needs too - and that's how you get into a bidding war. But it's right there!!!! yeah, but if it goes up to $500, there's probably one you could do some work on at a buy it now price of $80 to get to where that machine ends up, and you'll only have $120-$275 into it. So the sucker who won that machine just blew twice the money owing to excitement, rather than having enough money to buy two!
I recommend watching a few just go to someone else. Sure, if its starting bid is at $0.99, put a $1 bit on it, but don't get emotionally attached to the idea of "winning". The idea here isn't to win, it's to get a functioning laptop which meets your needs, and is within your budget. If you get caught up in the bidding and spend all your budget on a base machine which needs another $50-200 in parts, you're going to feel really depressed when you have to explain that to your friends and family. So let several go, price out what you'd need to buy to fix all the things which are wrong on the one you're looking at, subtract that and the combined shipping from your budget and place that max bid. If it goes above your max, let it go!! It doesn't fit your budget!
The basic concept of Zen (and I'm vastly over simplifying and paraphrasing), is to acknowledge and accept things as they are, and then to understand them as they are. Getting caught up in a bidding war when the little voice in the back of your head is saying "but we have to buy so many parts for that thing!!" is why the initial "high" of winning the bidding battle is quickly replaced with the remorse of the lost war for a fully operational machine that meets your needs.
With your specifications in hand, you can define your needs.
With your needs in hand, you can define what a machine is and isn't (complete, incomplete, repairable, unrepairable)
With knowledge of what a machine is, you will know if it will fit your budget (ready to run, or needs repair, plus shipping).
When you know if the machine will fit your budget or not, you can remove the emotion when bidding on an item, since you'll have a simple go-no-go line in the sand for whether you can afford it or not.
