Would you still sell a used laptop with XP ?

[erichardson]

Besides the vulnerabilities from a security standpoint, as time has gone on it's become more of a pain to troubleshoot as problems come up - just because 3rd party vendors devote less and less time to making sure their apps work with it...

In my case, for people looking for bargain basement pc's - I've been sending them to Dell's official refurbished small business outlet - they are cheap, solid, and come with a 100 day warranty through Dell. I then then typically charge a setup fee which includes data transfer from their old machine...plus once the Dell warranty expires, they typically come back to me for any additional work.

 

[AdamsAPlus]

Since these laptops were "Given To You" I would put a Windows type Linux on it. Probably Mint. And then Donate them to a school, library, Day Care, or something of that sort.

It sounds like you have no money invested in them. So why not help out the community and have a bit if a tax write off.

 

[B.I.T.S.]

I would say no. But then I don't sell any used hardware.

 

[gunslinger]

Since these laptops were "Given To You" I would put a Windows type Linux on it. Probably Mint. And then Donate them to a school, library, Day Care, or something of that sort.

It sounds like you have no money invested in them. So why not help out the community and have a bit if a tax write off.

Agreed. I like Mint but it would really depend on the system resources what distro I installed. I would not put mint on a machine with less than gig of RAM.

 

[NYJimbo]

I've decided to sell them to other techs I do repair jobs for. $75 each as is, these things look new and are almost spotless so I think its a steal if you know what to do with them. I already sold 5. Another tech wants to pickup 3 on Friday for some charity thing, so I think they will be gone pretty quick. This way the techs fully understand what they are buying and I don't have to do any additional work or worry about returns.

 

[Markverhyden]

I've decided to sell them to other techs I do repair jobs for. $75 each as is, these things look new and are almost spotless so I think its a steal if you know what to do with them. I already sold 5. Another tech wants to pickup 3 on Friday for some charity thing, so I think they will be gone pretty quick. This way the techs fully understand what they are buying and I don't have to do any additional work or worry about returns.

When I worked in the Oil business we used to call things like that "easy money".

 

[deachus]

I always keep 3 or 4 old machines with fresh XP installs on them in my shop. I specialize in servicing residential condominiums and homeowners associations. A ton of them use card/fob access systems that only run on XP per the system manufacturers. I keep the XP machines around for these clients when their ancient machines die and have no other option other than to buy another xp machine.

Actually sold an old Dell tower AthlonX2 with 4G ram, WinXP for $100 last week to a client with dead Keri access system pc. Machine cost me nothing.

All of these machines are given to me when I upgrade them to new Win7 Pro workstations.

 

[brandonkick]

Ship em out the door, you've done your due diligence in tell these people that the machines have an OS on them that will soon become that much more exploitable once it stops receiving security updates.

As far as I understand it, there are enough similarities between the core components of XP - Vista - 7 - 8 so that if issues are found and fixed in 7 or 8 then chances are those same problems (or some at least) exist in XP. So when the fixes come out, the hackers have a nice report of what is wrong in the older versions. May not be just that easy, but as far as I understand, that is the general idea.

If you inform your customers of the fact that they are buying a product that will not longer receive support, and they still want it, then let em have it.