Should I buy an extended warrantty for a refurbished T61?

Hi friends,

In follow up to my earlier threads about purchasing a new laptop for daily business/personal use, I think I may hold off on a new purchase till some newer models come out later in the year. In the interim I am getting a REFURBISHED Thinkpad T61 laptop with Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 2 GB Ram, 80GB Hard Drive, DVD/CD for $250 from MICRO CENTER.

I was wondering if I should purchase the additional 1yr warranty from Micro Center for an additional $40?

It currently has a 3month warranty from the store.

If you think I should take/avoid the warranty or the deal all together please tell me ASAP...I am at the store!

Thanks,
Desidude

 

Hi.
Can you confirm that it DOESNT have the nvidia GPU?
If it doesn't then I wouldn't bother with warranty. Can you also confirm whether it's been refurbished by Lenovo or by a 3rd party? I'd be a little more concerned with a 3rd party refurber.

 

Squaretrade

 

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. The unit was refurbished by an authorized Lenovo service center - Redemtech.

I am buying it from Micro Center which is a chain of stores across several cities.

I get a 3 month default warranty from Lenovo and the additional 12mo warranty is for $40 through square trade.

The cost for a 12mo warranty from square trade is $54

Thanks,
hulahoop

 

never ever buy extended warranty beyond what the computer already has from the factory. It would either work or not, and if it would fail then it would do so in the beginning or at the end of its lifetime, not in the middle.

just saying

 

if it is with the nvidia gpu and if you need the laptop to last for more than a year, then yes. Otherwise, i would probably just stick with the 3 months warranty and let it be.

 

T61 stuff is so cheap anyway, unless the warranty is dirt cheap and you don't want to fix it, I would just let it be. As others have stated, make sure you don't get an Nvidia _61 series laptops.

 

ah come on, you're so against the nVidia stuff where probably more HDD fail at the same time then GPUs ... The percentage was so small yet the hype so big.

I need to start buying T61s with nVidia for cheap now

 

Get an Intel SSD, and it'll last much longer than those melty Nvidia chips.

 

Hdd is cheap to replace, GPU is not. Not knowing the machine history you are taking a gamble.

 

you know when I got my laptop the GPU used to get hot at its stock form - I've seen up to 87 deg C or so, as far as I remember. Some of the machines even came with thermal pad between the GPU and the heatsink. I think that may have to do with what happened.

on the other hand my small 140m works at 55% overclock for like 3.5 years and doesnt get above 75 deg C due to the increased fan speed and upgraded CPU that doesnt heat as much. Overall I can say I'm really impressed from this specific nVidia chip.

there are couple versions of it though, some use DDR2 and others DDR3, some use 128MB memory, others 256MB. I'm not sure which ones are having higher failure rate among this class, but I got the DDR3 128MB one and as I said earlier I'm really impressed with it.

on some Dells they put the DDR2 version and due to not as good cooling compared to thinkpads they got higher number failing machines, or at least that's what I hear. On the thinkpad side the FX series give up more than the 140m, but those heat up more as well.

so what to say, draw your own conclusions. Plenty of nVidia computers working fine out there.