Am I crazy to buy a refurb xps m1730?

My ~5 year old Inspiron B130 has been wearing out in a variety of ways, and I'm looking for an inexpensive replacement. My primary requirement is a nice display, so I've been very attracted to a used xps 1730. I love the higher than typical vertical resolution (1920x1200). I see that quite a few 17" laptops these days are 1600x900. This is still a step up from my lowly B130, but I'm not a fan of that low of res on that big of a display.

So I have found what seems to be my dream machine - an M1730 from the dell outlet. Great display, great hardware, and ~650 bucks. But after searching around tons while waiting for it to ship out, I sure see a lot of people frustrated with reliability problems. The one from the outlet includes a great warranty, with 1 year on site (after phone diagnosis), but if it breaks after 1 year then it will not turn out to have been a very good deal. I don't really want to start investing in an extra warranty. If my choices are paying an extra $200 for a 3 year warranty, versus paying ~1200 for a brand new Sager (w/3 year warranty), I may prefer to go with the new Sager.

But if the m1730 could be a reliable machine for me, it sounds ideal. We use a laptop almost exclusively from the couch, so being big/heavy and with poor battery life is fine. My B130 wore down to ~10 minutes of battery life years ago, and we have done fine with it

Please help!

 

Considering that that is an old laptop, it would have probably had a few owners, being refurbished a couple of times aswell i would assume. I don't mind buying from the Outlet myself but i would much rather buy a current laptop from the outlet than an older one. And under all circumstances i would buy the 3 years warranty, given the age to say the least.

And as it seems you keep your laptops for a while, and keeping that in mind, i would go for a new one. You will probably be calling dell quite often if you were to go with the XPS.

 

I don't see that as a bad deal, although I don't know all the specs either. List them if you can. Being in IT and doing pc repair on the side, I mostly work on dells, and the two most common parts that go defective are the hard drives and the display ccfl bulbs/inverters. Both of those are cheap to replace, assuming you can do the work yourself. The only problem with the hard drives being a pain is if you don't do backups. Unless you're running a raid 1 or 5 array, always do regular backups.

 

Unless you are getting GeForce 9 cards for the M1730, it's kinda crapshoot because the M1730 is a model listed on the Nvidia Settlement. I would get a Sager that houses new SB processors, they absolutely crush whatever comes out of the Santa Rosa platform and you get a much more modern GPU.