Buying a cheap used laptops does have risks associated. I don’t recommend getting a laptop older than 4 years. There is just too much risk of things like the screen breaking down rendering it useless.

Also don’t expect a long battery life. I’ve my own laptop since new and the battery life has slowly decreased from 2 hours down to about 1 hour. However I hardly ever use the battery so I don’t really care. The battery is only really used when I want to carry the laptop from one room to another without shutting it down.

If you buy a popular model you should be able to buy a new battery for your laptop if you need to use your laptop on battery power.

Used laptops have small hard disk drives. The minimum size for a hard disk with Windows XP is about 6 gigabytes. Windows XP will take up about 2 gigs and so you will quickly run out of space if you install lots of applications.

However, I upgraded the hard disk on my laptop and now it has 20 gigabytes. Upgrading the hard drive on my laptop also dramatically increased performance.

Used laptops often don’t have much memory (RAM). Memory for older used laptops is actually quite inexpensive and it is very easy to upgrade.

I build my own desktop computer but I found upgrading my laptop was actually much easier. Check out the memory and hard drive upgrades for used laptops on this site.