The 12-Point Check to Run Before You Keep a Refurbished Laptop

The laptop arrived. You are about to log into your Google account and start working.

Don't. Not yet.

You have a return window, and it is finite. Ours is 14 days. Every day you spend setting the machine up is a day off the clock you have to find problems. Do the checks first. It takes half an hour and it is the highest-value thirty minutes of the whole purchase.

Here is the order I would do it in.

Before you even power it on

1. Photograph the unboxing. Video if you can be bothered. If something arrived damaged, this is the difference between a replacement and an argument. We ask for photos within 24 hours for damage claims, and every seller worth buying from has a similar rule.

2. Check the serial number. It should be present, readable, and not scratched. Match it against the invoice. A missing or defaced serial voids warranty almost everywhere, including here.

3. Look at the hinges. Open the lid slowly. Watch where the plastic meets the screen. Cracks near hinges are the most common structural failure on ex-corporate machines and the most expensive to fix.

First boot

4. Get into BIOS before Windows. Tap F2 or F12 or Del depending on the brand. If you hit a password prompt you did not set, stop. That machine is still owned by someone else's IT department. Return it.

5. Check battery health properly. Open a command prompt and run the battery report command Windows ships with. You want design capacity versus current capacity. Under 70% and you should be talking to the seller. Windows will happily show "100%" charged on a battery that holds half of what it should, which is why the report matters and the icon does not.

6. Confirm the specs match the listing. Actual RAM, actual storage, actual processor generation. Not what the listing said. What the machine says.

The tedious middle bit

This is the part people skip and then regret.

7. Every key. One at a time. Open a text editor and mash through the whole keyboard including the function row. Business keyboards are excellent but they are also five years old and somebody typed on this one for eight hours a day.

8. Every port, with a real device. Plug a drive into each USB. Connect a monitor to the HDMI and the dock port. Try the headphone jack with actual headphones. Ports fail individually and silently.

9. The screen, on a white background and a black one. Full screen white shows you dead pixels and stains. Full screen black shows you backlight bleed. Do both. A single stuck pixel is livable, a cluster is not.

10. Webcam, mic, both speakers. Record yourself saying something. Play it back. You will use these more than you think and discover they are broken at the worst possible moment.

Under load

11. Run it hard for twenty minutes. Anything that pins the processor works. Watch the temperature and listen to the fan. A machine that throttles hard or sounds like a hairdryer has a thermal paste problem, which is fixable, but it should have been fixed before it reached you.

12. Leave it unplugged for an hour of real work. Battery percentage at the start, battery percentage at the end. Now you know what you actually have, rather than what the report estimated.

If something fails

Do not attempt a repair yourself. Opening the machine will end your warranty, and unauthorised repairs are excluded from ours the same as everyone else's.

Contact the seller with the serial number, a description, and photos. With us that starts with support@lapshark.com or the phone number on the contact page. We attempt remote diagnosis first, usually within a day or two, and send an engineer if that does not resolve it.

Most of the time nothing fails and you have spent half an hour proving you bought a good machine. That is not wasted time. That is the confidence to stop wondering.