Hey everyone, I flip laptops if you didnt know 🙂
Fuck old floppy drives!
In a nutshell
- $20.07 – Paid for four laptops
- $3.00 – gas to get there, IF that
- $12.00 – Bubblewrap and tape cost?
- $12.00 – 5x 2 Prong power cords
- $0.00 – Box/Packaging cost – Free USPS boxes & reused box from something I bought
- $350 asking price in total, with free shipping
- $90 – 110CT with Windows
- $14 shipping USPS Medium box
- $80 – 430CDT w/o drive… boots
- $15.70 shipping USPS brown box
- $60 – 110CT doesn’t boot
- $14.00 USPS Medium Box
- $120 – 110CT working fully (it didnt)
- $14.00 USPS Medium Box
- Floppy didnt work
- $20 refunded + legal letter rate for it (8.75?)
- Floppy didnt work
- $14.00 USPS Medium Box
- $25.00 – EDO ram pulled from broken laptop
- $3.60 shipping USPS first class
- ebay takes 12.90% from the total value (including tax lol)
- $90 – 110CT with Windows
- PROFIT???
- $180 after ebay fees/shipping/supplies/refunds
- minus another $80 for booze 😉
Not sure if its common knowledge, but some of the best deals you can get on anything used is local. You have less competition, probably have to do pickup & need scheduling to do it right. For those who sell, it’s probably obvious, as they hound yard sales, thrifting stores, & random clearance sales. I personally had bad luck with Pawn shops locally, but the ones on eBay are a different story, you can snag a deal (maybe not so for a flip).
eWaste and electronic recyclers are the common known source to get all things vintage, next are estate sales, random ads on craigslist, but also local auction or surplus sales.
I’m not sure how I found it, but a site called CalAuctions must be based in San Diego or something, which is where I reside. They charge a percentage on top of whatever you bid. Well last year in 2022, I bought a lot of 4 Toshiba CT110 laptops, they were Satellite models, not the fucking sought after Libretto. But thats ok.
For those who didn’t know, Toshiba / Dynabook was one of the best selling laptop brands in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Legit it had like 50% of the market. Fun fact, Toshiba used the clamshell design without paying patent rights to Bill Moggridge who designed the GRiD Compass 1101. Guess who gets royalties from like every company who makes laptops?
One thing I like about Toshiba laptops I’ve came across working at an eWaste job, is that Toshiba integrated the power supply into their laptop. So all you needed, was a 2 prong cable that you’d use to connect to a TV, or to your laptop’s AC adapter. Toshiba wasn’t the only one who did this, this was probably because the old portables used 3 prong cables like desktops, as the machines were basically a desktop but slimmed down & miniaturized.
CalAuctions
Anyways, CalAuctions is a site I go to, and I do what probably everyone else at a thiftstore did b4 the workers caught onto it… searched what they were selling b4 buying. Also fuck the current CEO of goodwill, he’s a POS, woulnd’t be surprised if they go belly up.
CalAuctions is basically an estate sale auction house, but they do sales for colleges and businesses, even they’ll just sell a car for a private owner (or something ikd). Potentially the next best thing would be storage space auctions or police auctions… I havent dabbled on either, but you will need a big fucking trailer or box truck rental if you’re thinking of buying some of the shit they sell… I bid on a bunch of stuff from a community college that was nearby. I was biased bc of that certain school (i think southwest college?) I had bought four A31 laptops from someone, selling them for $20 as a lot, & they were pretty much immaculate, and I did make a profit off my first sale (like $20 i think in the end… lemme list the next A31 for $1200… nah im not like haftu2008).
Whatever, I bid on these laptops, and I saw that I could probably sell one of these untested for $50, so that was what I was expecting… or maybe $40 because I would have so many. Whatever. Working units, I think went at a max of $150, so maybe I can get the holy grail and grift that? I won the auction and had a max bid of $40, as scrap companies get like $10 a laptop if its good, so I outbidded them.
There was a lot of cool stuff there.
I wanted to drop like $400 on all the things there.
Auctions I lost on
- $77 – Mac Pro A1289 – Dual Xeons 2.26GHz
- Missing 2 HDD sleds, 2x GT120 graphics cards
- I’m not sure if I would of gotten $200 for it
- also idk if it was DDR2 or DDR3
- $60 – Old cinema display & 20″ iMac C2D
- Eh might of been able to sell for $50, idk about the display.
- Good thing I probably didnt win
- $60 – 4x iMacs 21.5″ i think
- Sorta bummed about this one, I may of made money
- all were untested, and the glass was cracked
- ez fix for them…
- Prob could of sold them for $50 each or even $100
- $74 – HP ProBook 15″ 6550b & Elitebook 8470p
- big gamble if they didn’t work
- at least they had the charger
- $168 – Lot of 7 laptops
- 13″ MacBook Pro Unibody
- 15″ MacBook Pro old style
- shitty consumer laptop
- ThinkPad T30, or R40
- Shitty laptop
- old laptop, maybe NEC or Gateway
- Purple Toshiba AMD Win 7 machine
- Super expensive for this lot. I think because of the macbooks
- Really wanted that T30
- $418 – 13 laptops
- 1 HP Elitebook 8460p?
- 4x HP Probook 14″ (marker written on laptop)
- 6x HP Elitebook 840 or 820? idk gen
- Eh the 6 elitebooks could of been good but imo it was too much
- $350 – Cisco Serial Wan interfaces, 20 of them
- eh…. didnt bid much for it
- $32 – TOA 900 Series II Amplifier A-912MK2
- eh, something to mess with, maybe record audio with
- $21 – NSF Shelf racks
- Prob worth $100, just wanted them
- $66 – 4x USB Apple Keyboard, 4x Mouses, & 4x iMac cords
- This isn’t that great of a deal, knock offs are $10, keyboards are $15 to $30
- mouses are eh, $10 easily
- Only would be good if I got the iMacs or Mac Pro
- $11 – Fuckton of old IT books
- Was gonna flip them for cheap
- Didn’t do any research to idk if it would of been good
- $25 – More books
- $32 – Misc Networking racks on a small wheeled shelf
- 2005 Apple X Serve or something, 14 HDDs in it
- Sun blade server
- other networking stuff
- Just wanted it for cheap. old 2005 400GB HDDs.
Picking them up
I had to go to the college and I was kinda pissed… I fucking hate parking at colleges in San Diego, it’s usually busy as fuck, I don’t know where im going, shits all confusing, they all want to charge money for their spots, you cant fucking buy them by the minute/hour, or give u a fucking ticket, and the closer spots are fucking taken. The website didn’t say anything where xactly to park at but luckily they had a spot we were able to pick up from.
I seen a few vans, bobtail trucks, regular trucks with trailers (some boxed, some not) all with various company names. In hindsight I should of taken photos of the event. There was a lot of items there I wanted to bid on. At the time I was driving a 2013 Prius and it could of fit a bit more things. I thought I was gonna win the auction on the iMacs but I was sleeping when the auctions were ending. I was sorta pissed that I lost the auction on the books but I saw the fucker who beat me. heh… he was using some random TV push cart and his books kept on falling whenever he passed through some of the slabs of concrete. I got the 4 laptops from the auction & saw some of the machines I lost on, I saw some and like saw it as junk, so I wasn’t really bummed out. When I was walking to my car, I passed by that guy again. He was probably in his 40’s or 50’s, dressed like a business guy, but lol he was mad because i guess more books kept on falling, so he just threw the ones that fell away. xD i should of snatched them, but nah.
Grabbed the laptops and put them in my car and went home.
Oh the fucking funny thing i forgot to say, was that there was a person who had a midsize Nissan pickup truck. The guy had sooooooo much stuff in his truck bed, and they were just reorganizing, just him and his girlfriend…. She probably fucking hates him for taking her along. They had a big ass pile. Like bro didn’t bother renting a trailer, it was a lot, of just server stuff, wires and misc components, and it was a fucking mound of shit on top of their truck… FUCK! The guys with the box truck was nice, they had a liftgate and pallet jack, so they were keeping it chill, well prepared. I wonder what they bought and sell, but it was a team of 3 or 4 guys I think and didn’t see how much was inside. Also never buy fucking big as industrial printers, they are a fucking gamble due to parts and all that shit… maybe if you want to use it, but I honestly woulnd’t want to buy and sell, because logistics would be a pain in the ass for you unless it’s a really REALLY expensive printer, that legit is worth 10K untested sold.
Testing & Selling
The batteries on these things were all shot. I think I had like 3 batteries in total and a few were leaking. Luckily there wasn’t any crazy damage to them, I think they just were not used when they started leaking anyways. Another reason why I didn’t want to include the batteries is due fucking FAA changing the rules when it comes to shipping anything with a used battery. I gotta put a UN3841 label or whatever on these (I’ve sold sooo many laptops on my own, and from my old eWaste job for years without issues), but because they were so old, already leaking, I wasn’t sure about it. And fucking ground shipping, or parcel select, I never done it, so I wasn’t sure about about how it was gonna go.
Good thing was that the standby and cmos batteries haven’t leaked, so I included them in the sale (forgot to remove them). Come to think of it, I never tried to test the laptops with the batteries installed. My IBM 2521 tablet died one time with that damn thing connected with the battery & power, so as a precaution I never tried testing any of these that way. Besides one was leaking, I’m sure the other ones will probably start leaking or whatever.
I really didn’t push these as fast I wanted to, I had a P50 w/ a BIOS lock that I sold to my dad for the E7440 that broke. Basically charged him for what I got for it, i think 150? whatever. Then I had the T470p laptops, two of them, but only one was good, and the i5 unit doesn’t charge. w/e made money on that. Dragging my feet, I finally had to get around flipping these things. SO I sold the best looking unit, and had to make sure that it turned on.
When I sold the first laptop for $120, I learned a few things, they aint a fucking easy sale like I thought it would be. The fucking floppies die on these things. At least that’s what the buyer said, and well… the other machines I had didn’t have a working floppy. At least the other 2, I couldn’t test the third one because I wasn’t sure how to take it apart, and really didn’t want to bother with it, because… I should be selling the floppy by itself and I would be damned to sell it more than $40 because that’s fucked up.
Anyways, I should of tested the fucking thing… I had some blank floppies that have Gen-Probe decals/engraving to see… All the drives sounded weird and Windows didn’t recognize it. I fucking kek’d hard when I rummaged thru the laptops I have here (in San Diego vs the hoarde at my parents house for storage) and it turns out I didn’t have any… ass.
So either the head goes out, which I guess can read the floppy, then there’s the motor, but the other thing is the damn rubber band the floppy drive uses to spin that shit.
Console5 sells the Matsushita EME-270TC drive belt for the 110CT
Link there for y’all to click on. its like $5 each plus shipping. Hopefully that’s all that it needs if you come across that.
One of the laptops didn’t turn on, but it did have a drive. the other two machine didn’t have hard drives. Annoyingly the 430CDT had the removable floppy drive (sort of like a removable ultrabay), and that’s the one I was able to remove and fiddle around with. But… the other machines didn’t have an easily removable drive. I had to remove the casing around it, to take out the floppy. Well on the broken machine, I tried doing that, but fuckton of screws and really didnt want to break the plastic casing, because they can be brittle and I’ve already have a hairline crack on one machine (swapped it to the broken one i think }:D) And even if I did remove the fucking crap, who knows if the connector would of been the same. Whatever.
On the broken machine I remove the RAM that it had, it was a proprietary connector type. Or at least it looked like it would be, not the typicall DIMM/SoDIMM you’d find… even at that RAM during this era was hard to find, so I took it out, tested it on the other laptop (which said it worked in bios) so yeah, I sold it. And it did sell for a lil bit. 🙂
The other two machines I didn’t really want to sell, I wasn’t sure. When I had to refund the guy, I was fucked because I was jsut gonna send money thru paypal as friends/family. but since ebay changed their payment shit, I couldn’t. And i was gonna try to message them to refund them via paypal, but fucking ebay does their shit where they dont let u message if ur trying to seek email addresses… after a week, i had my britbong moment and just said, I’ll send money thru the mail/
disclaimer: I work at the post office as a mail handler, meaning I work at the warehouse; prior to that, I shipped anything worth over forty bucks from an Electronic Recycling Center. But uh anyways, if u didn’t know, legally when you send mail via priority mail (ok i don’t know all the rules), they can’t scan the mail without notifying the inspector general. Yeah you can send… a lot of things, just pack it well and it’ll get there. Quite a lot of us don’t fuckign care what you send, and our nose will sense the herbs you send out… fucking learn how to package. Honestly, its really not that hard, seriously consider wasting $10 on tape/packaging if your sending something more than $200…. especially if its fucking “irreplaceable”, and tape all corners/edges.
what was I talking about? Yeah, I sent money thru priority mail, legal envelope, flat rate, to Alaska. Luckily I didnt get a negative review, but from there I knew… these fucking floppies cant be trusted.
Next laptop i sold was the broken 110CT that didnt boot. idk what was wrong with it, but fuck it. $60 with free shipping.
Then I had the Satellite Pro 430CDT, but it didnt come with a drive. Im so glad that toshiba just had a regular PATA drive connector for their hard drives and not some proprietary fucking connector like literally all of IBM ThinkPad classics b4 the 380….. yeah. So this laptop was able to boot from the broken laptop HDD. And I was originally gonna find a way to install drivers to that bitch. But no working floppy kinda fucked me over, and no USB ports yeah… I’d be damned to figure out how IR ports worked. I think I listed it for awhile with it having the drive, but no guarantees…. no bites or whatever. idk. I ended up taking that drive out and putting it onto the other 110CT.
I forgot the 430 had a bigger speaker or some shit, so it might of been better? my ass. ended up selling the 430 for parts and the 110CT just worked with the other drive. Also funy thing, they had a Nestle sticker on it, and then also something about HP. so maybe it was a laptop sold by HP, to Nestle and they did the IT work for them? idk.
Shipping
These laptops are fucking awesome to ship! They fit in a USPS medium flat rate box perfectly with their AC adapter. I was a little bit sketched out, because it didn’t have that much padding as I liked to do. I overpackage some of the items I sell, selling something this vintage, I was thinking it was best to overdo it, even if it’s not worth that much. I want to say I was able to do 3 or 4 layers of bubble wrap of and it was a snug fit inside the USPS medium box. I used a lot of tape and did tape all the corners just in case, my OCD wouldn’t let me not to. So shipping is just $14 via the post office to wherever in the USA. Only two items I think I paid extra for insurance, which was like a few bucks I think. Eh, its over $100, i really can care less if it was under $100 and i didn’t pay extra insurance. Kek I think one was thru USPS and the other thru ebay’s thing.
No complaints or messages really about returns. its been a few months since all of them and the return window just passed on the last one I think… really the only bad thing was that fucking floppy drive. If that rubber band was there… I would of listed the last one with a working floppy drive and it be good.
All in all, this was one of the profitable laptops i’ve bought in bulk. yeah I gotta sell the other A31 systems I have, and yeah I gotta sell that macbook and other shit I got. Whatever. The toshi’s sold, I got booze out of it, im happy.
My brother threw up in my car (which is now wrecked)