You’ve seen the ads. “Cheap laptops for $33!” or “Laptops: insane deals! $10!,” and for those wondering if it’s a scam or not, it’s not. Sometimes. These laptops are truly cheap, but as the old saying goes, you get what you pay for and for the price of two people seeing a movie in New York, you can have a laptop filled with problems.
“During the summer I bought one of those laptops from a site called Discount Computech. They’re gone now. The site looked like a warehouse site with all these laptops that stores had too many off and these guys were liquidating them,” says Leslie Carpenter. “But the laptop came via DHL and the origination point was in China. It smelled like gasoline; no joke.”
For Leslie, dreams of a cheap HP, Dell or Sony brand laptop computer came crashing down when she opened the box.
“It was a TZdulux,” says Leslie. “I started it up and it came with Windows Vista on it but it seemed really strange. I use Vista at work so I’m tuned to how it should perform and this seemed like a lite version. Errors on everything I did. It was like a netbook but an Internet connection didn’t help.
“$40 gone. My lesson in buying electronics through these tricksters cost $40.”
While Leslie’s experience was less than desirable, Angel Guzman of Chicago says his experience with buying a cheap laptop online shattered expectations.
“I bought a laptop for $50 so my computer cost a little more than [Leslie's] and I received it from Los Angeles,” says Guzman. “I knew right away that was a HP. A lot of places tell you that you can’t know the brand because they are selling the units below their the manufacturers advertised price. But I knew what it was.”
Did Angel’s new computer run Windows 95?
“No, it was running Vista. The real deal. I haven’t had any problems with it at all.”
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