Smashed Dell E1405: Your opinion

Hey, someone locally is selling a Dell Inspiron e1405 that has been smashed.

He says the only things that are not working for sure are the keyboard, LCD, and 1 of the RAM sticks, the one located underneath the keyboard.

However, he says the motherboard is slightly bent and the CPU looks like its in good working condition, so he is pretty much selling the CPU (T7200) 60gb hard drive, 512mb ddr2, 6 cell battery, wireless card, and fan cooler, and possibly dvd drive i haven't heard back from him.

I'm really interested in the CPU, but I don't know if it works, neither does he. He just states that the laptop won't start.

Please advise, should I buy it?

 

How much is he selling it for? I would not pay more than the 70% of the cost a used CPU (~$120-$140 on ebay) + used RAM (~$10 on ebay) and possibly the wireless (could probably get for $10-$20 but it would depend on the card)... All of the other parts are quite sensitive to being "smashed" and I would not trust them in my computer. That the impact was hard enough to "bend the motherboard" would concern me greatly. These are the reasons I would consider the rest of the parts "junk"

HDD: works under tight tollerances, a hard enough shock could damage the drive, maybe not enough that it wouldn't spin up initially, but you have no idea that it would be usable. I would be extremely hesitant to use it even as a secondary drive.

DVD: same as the HDD. If the laser is misaligned (not that hard to do) it is useless

Battery: if some of the internal wiring came loose this is a huge fire hazard

Fan: a hard enough jolt could damage the fan and cause it to be off balance, or damage the motor itself

I would not spend more that $120 for the whole thing

 

I'd buy the CPU if you were interested in it. Depends on the price.

 

OK thanks, the guy wants $100 for everything left, but the DVD-RW drive was broken so he threw that away...

the only thing i'm interested in is the T7200, but neither of us know if it works and i don't know how to test it

 

Will he not let you buy just one part? Also, what was it smashed by?

 

well i may use the 60gb hard drive to experiment with so i don't mind that


but he did not say how it was smashed, to be honest it looks like someone may have stepped on it, like the center middle portion of it is what's mostly damaged

 

Oh, so it doesn't look like there was a large force applied to the whole notebook, rather just one region destroying that part? I would have be concerned if that were the case about the HD since they don't like being slammed around and possibly even damaging the battery to the point that it may explosively fail.

 

yeah but he claims to have tested the battery AND hard drive and says they both work fine =/

 

Well if it was just stepped on, or had something dropped on it then I would say those two should be OK to use. However, I would keep backups for the hard drive, but you should do that with any drive anyhow.