Hardware How much is my broken laptop worth now?

ComeTurismO

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I know a bunch of people pay money to buy broken laptops, you guys might remember from this thread that it had a water spill on it and it turns on, but there's no picture. All lights work fine on the laptop, except the screen. It's a Windows 8.1 HP Pavilion 14-v038ca laptop.
 

FAST6191

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Does the picture work if you use an external monitor (you may have to do the relevant button combo)? If so then it might still be worth a bit, and maybe even fixing it. However I doubt it does and the others in the original thread probably went there.

If not then it is mostly suitable for parts, and water damage can change a few things there. A 4 gig stick of DDR3 is not the most valuable but you can probably find someone to benefit from it, a 500 gig 5400rpm drive is basically worthless for selling but if you need something to stick in a caddy then it could be worth the $15 a caddy costs, a DVD drive I guess might be worth something to someone that really wants one but probably not, the adapter and battery if they were not shorted to death (and the battery still worked) are probably half valuable. If you spilled water on it then chances are the keyboard is screwed but I guess you could part out the plastic covers if it is one that can take it (it looks like it might take it). No external video as well as no internal means the motherboard is hosed though you might be able to pull wifi and bluetooth if they are separate, possibly also the fan and heatsink, the screen assembly (plastic, webcam and screen if it still works) is worth salvaging and those speakers could probably be turned into half nice desktop speakers (even if they are beats brand junk).

I can price you the parts individually if you want to try that (though you can look at ebay with that list above as well as I), I warn you though that you will likely be sitting on them for quite a while. If I am buying a water damaged but "dead" laptop without testing then prices head downwards at a serious rate, especially for cheap and nasty consumer laptops like that. If you can get someone to pay the price of a new game then you have done exceptionally well, or found someone with a need of that particular model/model the parts are compatible with and it is probably going to be lower than that. In fact I usually get given them if I recover the data from the hard drive. If you are really bored you might be able to buy a new motherboard for it but unless you can fit it yourself (or know someone that can do it for free) then it is probably not worth it. If you can find a broken screen laptop and swap that over then maybe consider it, most such things are snapped up pretty quickly though if they appear at all.
 
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