Hey everyone. Soon i’ll be buying a Lenovo Yoga, used from someone on Kijiji. Whoever doesn’t know what Kijiji is, it is a website (like Craigslist) where people post the things they want to sell, and if you’re interested in something, you message them through email and make a time to meet up and a place, or have a short chat with them about their product. You can either choose to go with a friend or alone (usually going with a friend is a better idea), and if shit goes south, or you get a bad product, you’re basically screwed since Kijiji doesn’t do much to help.
Anyway, back to me, I plan to buy a Lenovo Yoga from someone on Kijiji soon, and I want people to suggest things for me to check before buying from the person. I already have a few things listed incase anyone else came here to also get some info on what to look out for.
Damage around Kensington Lock (probably stolen)
Use HWMonitor to check battery wear levels, idle temps, and then run Intel Burn Test to see temps under load, and view it with HWMonitor. If it overheats or gets to 90+ degree C, either the CPU Fans are dying, or the thermal paste is old/dried/gone.
Check laptops warranty with the serial number, or service tag on Dell’s. It’ll tell you how old the laptop is, or sometimes, if it’s not registered, it’s stolen.
Load up a black picture, and then a white picture to look for dead pixels, and a cloudy screen.
Check around the laptop to see if any plastic can be easily broken away (like a screw is missing and isn’t holding the plastic in place)
Broken ports such as USB or HDMI (broken USB is quite common for used laptops)
BIOS Password (usually means stolen)
Run a program such as HD Tune to see if there are any SMART errors on the HDD/SSD and do a short little speed test.
Quick run of memtest86. Memory errors usually pop up quick, and if the memory is on-board, you’re gonna have a bad time.
Now I want you people to suggest more things to check for when buying a used laptop/desktop/phone! It won’t only help out me, it’ll help out whoever is in the same situation as me, and wants to buy used!