Recently I was in need of a laptop and decided to save some money by buying a used one from a private seller on Craigslist. Here are some of the things that I did to make sure I was getting what I was paying for.

1. Ask for the serial number and if the seller was the original owner. In my case, I was buying a used Dell Latitude D630. Most Dell products have a service tag number which can be traced back to the original purchaser. If the seller doesn’t want to give you this information – they may be hiding something and you should look else ware.
2. Verify the information. If you contact Dell support and give them the information, they will verify the purchaser with the service tag and product. With IBM and HP products this may be more difficult because they owner may not have registered the product.
3. Check the warranty.
   • For Dell, click here then click Warranty Information (on the left).
   • For HP, click here.
   • For IBM, click here.
4. Get pictures. If you want to verify it is in working condition, ask for a picture of it “working.” Make sure it doesn’t have physical damage.
5. Clarify with the seller if the system comes with or without the manuals and CDs. I recommend that you make sure you receive as much of the original packaging, documentation, and CDs as possible. Make sure you receive the CD(s) for Windows XP.
6. Pay with a traceable source of funds like a check or PayPal.
7. If you are not prepared to do these things – buy refurbished equipment directly from the manufacturer. It may cost a little bit more – but the peace of mind will be worth it.
   • Offical Dell Outlet Store
   • Offical IBM/Lenovo Outlet Store
   • Official HP Outlet Store

Happy Shopping!

Happy New Year!

Since I do not have time every day to share a full post – I will start publishing a semi-daily list of links I found helpful or amusing. Enjoy!

• Top Engadget Posts for 2008
• Got Hotmail and Outlook? Then you need this add-in…
• Lenovo’s ThinkPad W700ds photographed and reviewed Dual screen laptop? Very cool. Price? $5,100 not so cool.

It was my intention to post this after my first week with the BlackBerry Storm, but the holidays and End of Year business activities prevented me from completing that task on time. However, I can tell you that my options over the last week have not changed and I have decided to keep the Storm. Here are my likes/dislikes.

Pros:

• Awesome Screen
• Easy to install applications
• SureType works very well
• Perfect Size weight

Cons:

• I STILL cannot open attachments
• ActiveSync is a LOT easier to setup/administer than BES
• Sometimes Sluggish User Interface

Over the coming weeks, I really need to fix the issue that is preventing me from accessing email attachments. I’ve heard that this is a configuration issue with my server – but I have not had much time to dive into a solution (expect me to post the results).

I’ve also noticed issues where the interface does not respond quickly (my Sluggish UI Con above). I suspect that this may be due to the number of installed/running applications or possibly, the phone trying to maintain its connection when I am in a weak service area.

Stay tuned!

4 days into using my BlackBerry Storm and I still cannot open attachments from my work email account. At this point, I suspect that the problem is with my BES configuration.

I did manage to find some useful utilities from emPower. I’ve installed the trial versions of their BES Mailbox and HTML Email Viewer utilities which are working as advertised. So I can now see my BES messages separate from all the other messages on my phone and HTML emails display correctly. I am not sure if this is worth the price of the full version.

Check out this awesome post on the Crackberry.com forums: Ultimate Official Tips and Tricks for the BlackBerry Storm.  There are a lot of great tips in there which have eased some of my annoyances with the touch user interface. In particular:

• When the keyboard is up: swipe your finger down across the keyboard to make it disappear, repeat opposite to make it appear.
• Touch the sentence you want to change and hold your finger there (don’t click!). The cursor will turn from a solid blue to just an outline of a rectangle. Then just slide your finger in either direction and you can place the cursor exactly where you want it.
• Also swiping left or right while viewing messages goes to previous or next message.

I also seem to be finding a lot of people who are as frustrated as I am with using the keyboard in landscape mode and perfer the SureType.

I am working on my Day 5/wrap up post and will have that up tomorrow.

Most of my interaction today with the blackberry storm was related to its (mostly not) syncing  with BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES).

I’ve installed BES over a dozen times and it never seems to work the first time. I’m glad to report that I was able to finally get it working for me after spending about 2-3 hours working on it (off and on).

Details about our BES setup: Server A – Dell PowerEdge 2950, Win 2K3 x64, Exchange 2007 and SQL 2005 Server B – Dell PowerEdge 2650, Wink 2k3, BlackBerry Enterprise Server 4.1.4

The BES was installed on a different server within our environment (a new configuration for me). This required that Microsoft Exchange Server MAPI Client and Collaboration Data Objects 1.2.1 be installed along with Exchange Server Management Tools. After some trial and error with mailbox and service account permissions, I was finally able to get my phone to accept a wireless enterprise activation.

Thanks in part to this excellent post about troubleshooting Enterprise Activation issues.

I don’t like the way that the Storm is displaying my email and other messages. All messages go into one place (Text, MMS, Exchange). I prefer that different types of messages go into different buckets. I will need to do more research on this. Also, attachments are still not working properly. I am going to try and resolve that problem tomorrow along with the ability to read emails as HTML.