Nice. If you are good at electronics or can get help, you can save a lot of money on computers if it just needs repairing but is sold extremly cheap because it's broken.

Yeah, my uncle's a IT guy.  Then I've got my dad, and of course, me.  If we can't fix it, then it's probably unfix-able.

One thing I remember about Dell laptops from that time period is that the power cord from the AC outlet to the power supply itself develops what I would call a "bad connection." Where you can get a total loss of AC power to the power supply for a short period of time. I believe capacitors in the power supply can maintain voltage to the laptop but that will diminish at some point -- causing a "brown out". And brown outs can cause havoc to the CPU and/or peripherals.

possibly, i have heard about this... wait... i just had a brainwave

I have a dell latitude xt2 (it's ma laptop i use to forum on omnimaga) but i have heard that students in the grade above me (they have Lenovos) had some fried melted! harddrives and stuff.

I dunno. Dell is very different in Australia than in the US. In Australia, u can just build your own desktop computer (laptops are something different) which is why Dell is so successful in the US

In reply to the original post...

Wow 50 dollars! (USD) that's crazy, and nice specifications!
my dell xt2 cost $2262 (what a ripoff) well kind of cuz it has touchscreen/multitouch
and insurance and everything
it was required that a computer was needed to go to my school. (but u can borrow an older lenovo)