Buying a Lenovo Thinkpad Notebook? Read this first!

I purchased two Lenovo T500's on eBay and got burnt twice by the sellers.  I am here to educate buyers. 

When the seller claim the notebook's are new, it's most likely a lie!!!

The Lenovo notebook prices on eBay are a lot cheaper then what you would find on Lenovo's website and here's why:

Majority of the Lenovo Notebook's on eBay are NOT new like the sellers claimed it to be.  Most of the Lenovo Notebooks are actually "refurbished or redistributed" notebooks.  Notebooks that the original customers purchased but either didn't want it anymore and returned it back to Lenovo or they didn't like it after using it. 

Many ebay sellers purchase those returned notebooks in BULK from Lenovo.  Since Lenovo charges a decent amount of money to for bigger "ram and hard disk space", many of the sellers here add more ram or swap it for a bigger hard drive.  For example, Lenovo may want to charge $180 for a Seagate 320GB 7200 RPM HD, but you can buy one from another online store for $80 dollars.  So what the sellers do is that they "clone" the hard drive, install a larger hard drive and then put the cloned contents into the larger hard drive.  So instead of the 160gb hard drive they originally got, the notebook now has a 320GB hard drive.  Same goes for ram (memory), it only costs about $60 dollars to upgrade to 4gb of ram, where as Lenovo will charge about $150.  So many sellers will add more ram.  So if you look at the ORIGINAL system configuration, it may only show up as 2GB of ram. 

How do I know this?  First off when you buy a notebook from an ebay seller, just ask for the system's serial number.  When you go to Lenovo's website to do a warranty lookup, it will show when the notebook was shipped.  Let's say a notebook was shipped on March 1, 2009.  The seller of says that the notebook expires March of 2010.  The current month is June of 2009.  If it's "brand new", where did the other 3 month's warranty go?  If the item is truly new, then the warranty should still have at least 11 months left. 

When we receive a package, most of us open the package from the top.  When's the last time you opened something from the bottom of the package?  Many of the sellers open the package from the BOTTOM of the notebook and then tape the bottom of the notebook back up so it would appear that the original security tape hasn't been opened before.  Then when you receive the notebook box, you see the tape on the top of the box which is indeed "factory sealed".  However, if you look on the bottom of the box, you may see a neatly cut packaging tape. 

So be warned that when the seller says the notebook is "new", in a way it is and it's also not.  Always ask when the warranty of the system expires.  If it's June of 2009 and the warranty expires in March of 2010, then you know the system has been sitting there for 3 months.  Also, the so called "upgrades" that the sellers do to the notebook IS NOT covered by Lenovo's warranty because it was not installed by Lenovo.

I hope this helps.