lets talk about laptops

[aaron p]

What do most of you guys do with them? Full tear down, or pull battery, ram, cpu and sell rest as incomplete grade? Ive got about 100 laptops, mostly with bad screens and missing ram. I dont want to go through the pain of tearing the motherboards out again. I dont know what mario requires exactly to be left in them to get the incomplete price besides the motherboard. Most of the ones I have had the ram and batteries pulled allready.

[JJinLV]

Full tear down. I've gotten pretty quick at it so it's well worth the time.

[jimicrk]

I've received about 50 this year so far, so I tear them down. That's a drop in the bucket compared to other members.

Why don't you contact Mario and see what his requirements are?

[aaron p]

Ive got a email in to him. Waiting on a reply. Just looking for other opinions.

[HipoGear]

If the screens are bad, all you will get from tearing them down is the MB, CPU, and a heatsink. While the laptop MB price looks quite attractive, they don't weigh very much. Does anyone know what a typical laptop MB weighs?

Even if the screens are good, the current payout is only $1.50. With all that said, I would probably just pull the RAM and send them in the way they are.

[aaron p]

A larger laptop mobo weighs .4lb roughly, so its worth $1.85 or so. Not worth the labor to pull.

[tski72]

My local guy pays me about a buck a pound on laptops. I try to make to make them as complete as possible. It's the quickest cash at the moment because all I have to do is stack them. Almost zero work and they take them with batteries.

[auminer]

I pull the RAM and crosscheck it with Parttimescrapper's MTS pricing and stack the laptops otherwise whole for my next trip to the ewaste yard.

[aaron p]

Im glad you mentioned parttimescrappers MTS page. I turned $45 worth of ram into possibly $130 just by looking. Some DDR3 4gb and 2gb. Lots of DDR2 2gb. I love this forum, been a huge blessing. I shipped out all the incomplete laptops to mario this afternoon. 630lbs worth. This option made the most time and money sense to me. I figure if im not making atleast $20-25/hr profit while scrapping, im spinning my wheels. Stripping them for the motherboards was less than $10-15/hr. Product in, product out. Still got alot of work to deal with. Will have another pallet box ready to go out in a week im sure.

[Breakage]

I would recommend selling working and vintage units as-is, for better than scrap price. It's usually less handling and, assuming you have i-series machines, the payout is quite a bit higher. There are a number of websites that buy laptops sight unseen and I have gotten excellent quotes for similar devices from SMF buyers. I have sold a few machines from the mid-1990's and while the take wasn't a ton higher than scrap, it was substantially less work than d-man. Most other machines go whole to scrap as it is the easiest and best way to handle the screens, regardless of condition, especially now with all the Core 2 machines and netbooks pouring in (though some very cheap netbooks have very new RAM chips; don't overlook that opportunity). I do have a pile of screens which look pretty OK but since I can't test them properly and don't want to get dinged for shipping broken junk, I haven't quite found away to cost effectively sell any number of them. Probably, for screens, it makes sense to ship a very high-value LTL load, top off with screens, and let the chips fall where they may. At this point, though, I hardly bother with tearing down anything that isn't already basically stripped.

Also, don't underestimate the parts market. If you have a damaged machine, especially if it's quite old or very new, you can flog the keypads and even some of the ports pretty consistently.