Do your Homework before buying a new laptop!

It was now about two months ago around middle of the October 2019 when i went to Expert Electrical in Ganley's Athlone just to browse and see prices and range available.

As you would expect for 200-300 Euros choice is really limited and laptop in that price range is maybe only good for some internet browsing and that would be questionable, it like everything else if you are willing to pay bit more then you will get a better device but not always case.. will explain more below.

Ok, let's say you are willing to pay 400 Euros for new laptop and i theory it should be good enough for casual browsing and maybe some light photo editing etc. and in most cases it would be true but not here because if you went ahead and purchased this Asus X540LA-DM1052T on the picture above then you would buy yourself a 5 year old laptop!

Don't get me wrong it's not a bad laptop and will be probably be ok for basic needs but the way i see they should be mentioned when you actually buying it. Since then i had look online to see pricing for the same laptop and its pretty much the same.. around 350-390 Euros so can't really blame on shop doing it.

Im selling used laptops time to time and i sold  very same laptop anbout 3 moths ago in used condition for 140 Euros because i could not justify asking more for 5 year old laptop with only 4GB RAM and slow 1TB HDD.

How to find out laptop's correct age?

It is actually easier then one would think, in personal experience easiest and safest way to find correct age of the laptop is to see when was laptops CPU/Processor released and do that is very easy and really anyone should be able to figure it out.

All you have to do is go to your laptop's system setting or right click on This PC/My Computer and navigate to properties where you are able to see processor model.

Above laptop Asus X540LA-DM1052T is built with 5th generation Intel® Core™ i3-5005U cpu and if you google this processor then you will see that it was released Q1'15, currently Intel has released 10th generation processors so you could buy laptop with Intel® Core™ i3-10110U Processor and probably close enough to the 400 Euro price mark.

Alternatively you can go to AgeCast.com and type in your cpu model and run calculator to find out correct age of your device, try it here: Asus X540LA-DM1052T

Do your homework before buying!

Best advice i can give is do find out all the facts about laptop you are thinking to buy and don't expect seller to tell you all the facts about device.

As you see from sample above its really easy to go wrong with purchase and really for same money you could have 5 years newer laptop with up to date technology and features.