Laptops available for Rs 5,000 in Nehru Place

Laptops cost a lot of money, right? Wrong. Second hand laptops costs just
about Rs 5,000 for a 486 model, which is about five to seven years old, in Nehru
Place. A PIII machine may cost Rs 25,000. More recent P4 avatars command around
Rs 38,000.

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 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 a say 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.

According to Anil Chopra, Manager, PCQ Labs, Linux can be run on 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 be
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 changes hands, "Bhagwan
Bharosa," to quote a dealer. And 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.

(CNS)