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Electronics & Appliances Best Posts in Thread: junk laptops

  1. DaveD

    DaveD DI Senior Member Showcase Reviewer Veteran Navy

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    Yes, I agree most electronics here are crap and you will pay through the nose for anything decent. There is a 100% duty on all luxury goods imported into the country. Best bet is buy when out of the country. You can import almost anything duty free if it is for personal use so say you travel to Hong kong, Europe, North America, whatever and you can buy a new cellphone, Tablet, laptop, speakers, headphones etc. and bring them back in Country as long as they are not still in original packaging and state they are yours for personal use and they are duty free. I have had many people I know do this. If you don't or can't do that maybe you know a friend who is coming for a visit you could ask them to do same thing. Just remember to open the packages and play with them before bringing them in. If still in new packaging and don't look like they have been used before they may try to charge you import duty.
     
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    DaveD, Oct 28, 2015
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  2. TheDude

    TheDude DI Forum Patron Highly Rated Poster

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    Best Answer
    I doubt there is much difference of the internals between different laptop brands. There are a small number of manufacturers that make those internal components. I imagine that it's such a cutthroat low margin business that only a handful (and the biggest) can survive. It's probably also relatively capital intensive and technical as opposed to stamping out toys. At least Apple and Dell can sell their brand recognition to get some extra dollars out of assembling and packaging those components.

    It seems that most laptops here get sold with 2GB of RAM. Anything with more than that is probably going to be packaged as a high-end system with greater specs than what you need. Your best bet there might be to find cheaper laptops which can be upgraded to 4GB. Upgrading could set you back around $100 though. Aside from greater RAM, one of the best upgrades you can make for performance is to get an SSD drive. Those are also expensive, so you would need to drop that 500GB of storage, if you could fit an SSD in your budget at all. You could make up the gap in available storage with external storage.

    I hate the idea of spending lots of money on electronics. Being in the Philippines and being rough on my equipment, I would rather go cheap and replace more often. I'm seriously considering the option of going with a local branded Windows tablet. I need to be able to play with one first, but I believe that Windows 10 allows installation of regular desktop software (?) and allows multi-tasking. There are tablets which come with keyboards and of course you can plug them into an external monitor and desktop type keyboard while at home.

    Good luck!
     
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    TheDude, Oct 28, 2015
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