How would you sell your old (faulty) laptop?

[qpop]

Hi guys, as documented in the Dell outlet thread I recently picked up a bargainous Dell L502x. This was due to my Samsung Q310 a)being old and b)developing a worrying fault.

This is most likely due to one or more of the following:
*A couple of months ago I broke the screen, this was subsequently repaired by my home insurance company.
*I plugged in a Samsung R710(I think) charger (same port and same power rating, ampage included)
*I dropped it 5 feet onto concrete.

Basically now when I plug it in the charger crackles a bit and you can smell electrical burning. The last time I tried it when powering down the CPU was reading temps of 80+ on RM Clock.

Now...What would you do to get rid?

Sell it on eBay? - The only completed listing I could find was the same model that would only power up 1/20 tries, and that sold for £70

Sell the constituent parts? - It's got a nearly new LCD panel, 2x2gb DDR2 RAM, 320gb SATA HDD, battery that was hardly unplugged ( I think RMClock battery polling suggested it still retained 97% capacity) and power adaptor (these things are expensive right?) - Would I make more selling it seperately? If so how would you break it down?

Decisions, decisions!

I think if I got £100+ for the constituent parts it'd ease the burden of buying the Dell a bit, but I don't know how much second hand/faulty laptops tend to go for!

 

[PhoenixSP]

possibly when you dropped it it knocked a heatsink loose and perhaps damaged the dc jack so its grounding through something , may be worth opening it up reseating the heat sink and then selling it as used if you can get it working safely.

 

[qpop]

I'm not really very confident to try and fix it; the fact that it only intermittently registers the charger combined with the burning smell really puts me off!

It's a good point though; I keep thinking maybe it isn't as broken as I'm thinking, I just don't have the technical skills/desire to set house on fire to try it...

 

[PhoenixSP]

well the burning smell is possibly the cpu running at high temps however if not confident ebay as spares and repair detailing the new screen is probably the best option.

 

[richb93]

Burning smell is almost certainly the DC socket. It's incredibly common for these to develop faults and I've had a good few machines that have had faulty sockets which caused the jack to get very hot as well as smell bad. It's usually a case of resoldering them which is very easy to do as it just means carefully taking the machine apart and then applying solder over the DC socket terminals as these have worked their way loose. As daunting as it sounds anyone can do this as long as you take it slowly and make sure you document how it goes back together

EDIT:

intermittently registers the charger

I'm 99% certain that the socket is your problem and the rest of the machine is fine!


Fix it and sell it for a lot more!