Psstwant the very latest super-fast computer with go-faster stripes and a really fast graphics card? You're reading the wrong section then, squire - this is for serious systems, chugging along and doing business work. Number crunching, word processing, that sort of thing - so there's really no need to go for anything that costs more than fifty quid from a breaker's yard, is there?
Actually, depending on your requirements, that's not so far from the truth. With the emphasis on the fastest and best there are a lot of second-hand computers coming on to the market which were state of the art only a couple of years ago, and if they worked then, they'll most likely work now.
Paul Whyles runs his second-hand bookshop on a second-hand computer he found on a conferencing system. He bought it late last year and uses it to run his site at http://home.clara.net/pwhyles. He spent £148.87 inc VAT for a Fujitsu Pentium 166MHz PC with 64Mb of Ram and a 2Gb disk. It was actually made in 1997, and Whyles needed to have his own CD-rom drive and software to bring it up to date enough for his purposes.
Something that is evident from Whyles's experience is that he had to know what he was doing in order to make any use of his system. Adding a CD-rom is straightforward for anyone with a little nous and a manual; reconnecting the serial ports was something else he had to do as the system was too old to have modern USB connections for easy addition of printers, cameras and other peripheral gadgets.
The next stage was not so simple: "My problem with it was that it only came with 256k of video memory [which allows] 16 colours," he says.
"I must have at least 1Mb of video memory, otherwise I'll get distracted. The board has expansion for video memory but I've not been able to get any. I bought a second-hand PCI vid card for about £5 that works just great. However, it is using up a scarce PCI slot."
In terms of functions the system is hampered by its age. But for Whyles, the fact that he writes his own pages as an extended Microsoft Access database means that all he has to worry about in terms of leading-edge technology is to get the current version of Microsoft Internet Explorer running at any given time. He seems more than happy: "Buying second-hand saved me around£500: not much I guess, but when you are self employed It also makes me feel good as I like to recycle."
The larger customer can also make use of the second-hand system, although in the business market they're more comfortable referring to them as "second-user". Phil Reakes is managing director of Selway Moore, a company that sells new and second-user systems from Sun and Hewlett-Packard, and here we're talking about HP's large multi-user systems rather than the home-based stuff. Selway Moore's policy is to mix new and old system sales so that it can take care of systems over their complete life cycles. "At the end of the life of the computer we take it from the customer in exchange for money and put it on the second-user market," says Reakes.
His view of the second-user market is overwhelmingly positive because in his experience products actually tend to be more reliable when bought in that way.
"Independent report swill tell you that 40% or so of computer failures happen between the customer opening the box and setting up the system: assembly issues and things like that. Second-user systems will have been repaired in the field if they were dead on arrival: the manufacturers don't tell you that."
Apart from old computers being of a lower specification, quality assurance is probably the other issue keeping people away from the second-user market. This is where buying from someone reputable is bound to help; Selway Moore is an accredited Sun and HP dealer and will purchase a warranty for buyers of second-user kit so they are covered every bit as much as if they had bought new, while Whyles was offered a 30-day warranty only. Buyers of systems from QXL, eBay and other auction or classified sites are unlikely to get that reassurance, though it should be stressed that there's normally no need to be suspicious of any but a small minority of sellers on these sites.
For all that, though, the main problem with second-user systems remains the specification. Neil Leacey, an independent developer and refurbisher of these second-user machines says: "The proviso I always tell people is 'don't moan at me when you see your neighbour's brand-new 3D-super-whizzo all-singing, all-dancing machine and realise you can't live without being able to watch a DVD film on a 17" screen'. If you want that sort of thing, spend the money and get your self a decent widescreen telly and player!"
However, the real killer for the second-hand computer dealer is the tax relief offered to buyers of new systems. This has come about because the government has been keen to promote IT to small business. For the small "c" conservative customer, though, who doesn't want a system that does absolutely everything but only something reliable for number-crunching and report writing, second-user systems shouldn't be written off.
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Jargon-buster
MHz: Megahertz, the speed in millions of calculations per second that a computer's brain - the processor - works at.
USB: Universal Serial Bus, the most recent standard for attaching devices such as printers and scanners to your PC.
Ram: Random Access Memory, which comes in megabytes (or "megs").
Video memory: Special memory, separate from Ram, which is used to create images on the screen.
