Laptops available @ Rs 5,000

Sudarshana Banerjee

NEW DELHI: The government of India is a milk cow for the middle men or contractors. The take with the government is that for a requirement of x number of laptops, the exact configurations of the same are very vague. For a tender of laptops required at a ministry level, there is nothing that specifies that the laptops have to be brand new. The middlemen buy second hand laptops, recondition the same, and sell it to the government at a higher price. Often at 300 percent margins!

In the US, there are auctions of reconditioned computers. Reconditioning of laptops is also done here, right at the heart of the city; of course there are no auctions as such. The process involves adding some memory or making such similar cosmetic changes in the hard disk.

A PII laptop may be given a PIII processor and sold as a PIII laptop and never mind the performance. "Of course, if the soldering has to be changed then the processor cannot be reconditioned. If it is a matter of sockets, then the sockets can be removed from the board and a PI replaced with a PII and so on. These are model-specific," revealed Rajeev Kochhar of Micro House India.

Another interesting trend is the exodus of Taiwanese products in India. A lot of unbranded hardware/electronics products come from Taiwan. And they come dirt cheap. So what we have is a group of traders importing a batch of laptops, branding it some fancy name and selling them in the grey market. Stickers too can be imported through similar channels and more often than not the company whose names are brandished on the products have no existence at all.

Can a trader put, for example, Compaq label on a Taiwanese laptop and sell it as a Compaq machine? "Unlikely," commented Anil Taneja of Computer World Systems, "Brands like Dell or Compaq have well known box shapes. But the possibility cannot be entirely ruled out."

Taneja, who has been in Nehru Place for the last 10 years, added, "If the source of power is okay, a laptop gives better performance than the desktops." A five to seven year old second hand laptop can easily have a lifecycle of a further five to seven years, without any major hassles, he pointed out.

Anil Chopra, manager, PCQ Labs, informed that Linux can be run in these laptops, but not Unix and definitely not more modern counterparts like Oracle 8i. "If it is possible to run Windows 3.x, then the range of applications will increase. Older and DOS based versions of dbase, FoxPro and WordStar can also be run," he added. It goes without saying that the laptops come without any sort of warranty or guarantee.

The term used by the Nehru Place dealers is "Counter Testing" warranty. In simplified terms, this means that you can test out the laptop in whatever way you want to before buying it over the counter (and thus the name). But once the money and the machine change hands, "Bhagwan Bharosa," to quote a dealer. If the laptop starts malfunctioning or refuses to function at all on the way home from Nehru Place, tough luck.

The number of units traded (sold and purchased) of second hand laptops in the Nehru Place market is around 100 odd units on an average, every month. According to the dealers, buyers comprise mostly of people like marketing persons who have to give customer site presentations, chartered accountants and other professionals and lastly the students and the home segments. The ‘feel good’ factor is a key purchase point, they inform. After all, a laptop is a laptop is a laptop.

(CNS)