5punk

helloes!

as i'm going back to the land of bikinis and barbecues soon, i've been looking into a laptop, to keep up with the homefront from time to time. as i'm only going to use it for internets and things alike, i've been given this offer:

IBM Thinkpad A20m

- P3-700 Mhz mobile
- 384 MB RAM
- HD 20 GB
- TFT 1024*468
- FLOPPY-drive en CD-lezer (of tegen klein supplement CD-writer)
- graka is een ATI met eigen video-ram
- modem en 10/100 LAN onboard
- soundcard onboard
- interfaces: USB / PS2 / parallel / serial / VGA / 2 PCMCIA-uitbreidingssleuven
- batterij en power supply are included.

(some dutch bits are too hard to translate, but i'm pretty sure it makes sense)

he's asking €190 (£130) for it. a good deal?
what say you?

Considering a very quick look at ebay for similar prices, that seems a pretty good deal. Is it running Windows XP, or 2000? Either should be allright, as you said, its just going to be used for internet browsing, so should be fine for that. One possible issue you'd find would be the size of the harddrive; but you can upgrade this yourself on most laptops (they normally take 2.5" drives).

For such an old machine (that model is almost seven years old), that price honestly sounds a little - alright, a lot - high to me, and that's not even taking into account the "small supplement" required to get a CD writer with it. Bear in mind that the Thinkpad A-series of that era were desktop replacements - i.e. not small and lightweight. An A20m weighs over 3kg. I'd definitely pass on it.

For that money you should be able to get a reasonably-specced T30 in decent condition or a well-specced T23 in very good condition.

i bought it anyway, my mother decided she'd pay it for me as a gift, so no losses are made in the end