Anyone know a place that buys damaged laptops?

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dissipate

PHP Ninja
Jun 15, 2007
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My brother managed to spill an entire glass of water on a (new) extra laptop of mine, and not tell me until 2 days later. Needless to say, the usual liquid spill-save tactics failed me. Gateway decided the liquid spill voided the warranty, and now I'm left with an $800 paperweight. Anyone know of a place that buys damaged laptops?
 


Did you buy it with a credit card that offers protection? Lotsa people forget about that.
 
sell the screen, ram, hdd, keyboard and touchpad on ebay (the parts that are still good). Theres always someone on there with the same laptop and an opposite problem. Screens usually sell between $150-$300, so that right there usually recovers a portion of the cost.
 
I own dcjackfix.com and repair laptops, you can go there and ship it and I will clean it out for you. Don't try to power up and make sure you remove the battery.

Thanks for the offer, but he managed to power it up after he did it and "tried" to dry it out. The laptop worked for about 2 days before crapping the bed.

And yes, i did adequately beat him into the ground =)
 
buy a new one (same model), return the bad one (replace sticker with serial #) and get you money back.
 
If you're a manly man about it, sampunk probably has the best idea...
If you just don't have the marbles to do that, sell it on Craigslist, cash only. Try to find someone not in your immediate area.
Say you have no plug and sell it for a bit cheaper because of it. Then you can say that the battery is just dead.
After that comes just parting it out.
 
if you decide to sell it on ebay, you'll probably get more for it if you part it out. At least, take out the hard drive and ram. If you are technically inclined (meaning, you have a very, very small screwdriver/torx set) do what was mentioned before and get the touchpad, keyboard.

Screens are getting good prices. Besides their original use, a lot of people are finding alternative uses for them, like DIY digital picture frames and mounting them in their "carputers."

If you can get at the CPU, it might be worth getting out if it's a pentium3/high-end celeron or pentium4. Whatever your CPU is, check the prices at ebay or other places and see what the used ones are selling for.

Also, make sure there is nothing on the hard drive that you don't want anyone else seeing. If you have sensitive stuff on there, you can get an adapter for about $5-7 that allows you to plug it into a PC mainboard and use it.

Copy anything you want to save, then do a low-level format(writes 0000's to the entire "usable space" on the drive) with the drive manufacturer's utility (Seagate, WD, IBM/Toshiba all provide their utility for download)

Another thing- save all the little screws that you took out and keep track of where you pulled them out. You could either sell those on their own, or you could include them with whatever they were holding in place.

I know from experience that whomever is on ebay desperately looking for a replacement touchpad is probably not thinking about the screw that used to be on the table, but has since rolled off, never to be seen again.
 
I'm in the same boat and never even thought of selling it off for parts.I was just going to pull out the drive and throw the rest in the bin. I guess I'll need to go out and get some tiny screwdrivers.
 
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