First, you need to ask some basic questions to yourself and whoever is selling the machine:
- Is it a fair price? Feel free to call us up and tell us the PC specifications and we will tell you if it’s a fair price!
- Does it have a fresh install of Windows? If not, it likely will be slower than it could be and will also likely have malware or viruses on it.
- Does it have a good antivirus and firewall with plenty of license time left? If not, you will have to get one! If you’re unprotected, it only takes an average of 4 minutes to become infected while online.
- Is the PC motherboard in good condition? What’s the most common major failure of PCs today? Bad motherboards. What’s the most common reason for a bad motherboard? Bad capacitors. Do you know how to look for bad capacitors? Capacitors are the most common failure on PC motherboards, and if some are going bad (which are easy to see) then the system will be unstable and lockup; if not immediately then soon.
- If it has a CDRW drive, then has the burner been tested? Even if the drive will Read CDs, that does NOT mean it will Write CDs. If it hasn’t been tested recently, you can’t tell.
- How big is the hard drive? This is important to ask because it indicates the age of the drive. If it’s less than 200GB, it’s more likely to fail because those drives are quite old. Often drives do not fail completely. They begin to get bad spots, or sectors, which will cause data loss and system crashes. This is also often the cause of a PC being unable to fully boot up, failing with an error message.
- Is a good warranty offered? If they don’t offer at least a 30day warranty, I would not recommend buying it.
Get more than one phone number to reach the seller at. If they don’t have more than one number, think twice about buying it, especially if that one number is a cell phone because it’s too likely that the number will change in the near future.