UPDATED: Toshiba offers up to £150 for your old laptop (depending on its manufacturer)

 

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Posted on 3 Nov 2009 at 20:07

Toshiba is offering cashback against a new Windows 7 laptop if you trade your old one in. For most old laptops this should see people net up to £150.

Before you buy a new computer you can use the Toshiba trade-in website to get a rough valuation of your current computer.

This asks you to provide information including your laptop's processor, memory, hard disk, condition and optical drive. You're then given an instant valuation, although this is dependent on a final physical check by Toshiba after you've bought a new laptop and used the freepost service to send your old model back. You'll also need to provide your new laptop's serial number on the trade-in website to prove purchase.

It's an interesting idea. Testing the site we found that trying to trade in a new laptop isn't very good value. Currently, if you select the highest specification laptop (a 3.3GHz Core 2 Quad-based laptop), Toshiba is offering up to £570. This price, obviously, isn't a very good deal for such a powerful computer and you'd have to be mad to try and sell such a new computer for this amount.

"The Toshiba Trade-In scheme states that consumers will be offered up to £150 cashback when they trade in their old model for a new Toshiba Windows 7 laptop," said Toshiba in a statement. "In most cases this is the highest cashback figure that consumers will be presented with when they enter an old model that they want to trade in.

"However, there will be some consumers who may choose to trade in a new, high spec laptop, and this will be valued accordingly and will therefore offer a higher cashback figure than £150."

The other to look out for is that the manufacturer makes. Choosing the highest spec laptop and setting the manufacturer as Sony currently nets you £570; changing the manufacturer to Advent lowers the valuation to £523 - a £47 difference.

Picking a more reasonable specification for a laptop (a 1.7GHz Pentium M processor, 512MB of RAM and Windows XP), gives you a more realistic price. However, for a Sony laptop with this specification you'll get just £78. The discrepancy between manufacturers stays, so the same specification but manufactured by Advent will get you only £67.

Ordering manufacturers by valuation price, you get the following list:

• Top earners:Compaq, Dell, HP, IBM, Lenovo, Sony, Toshiba


• Middle earners:Acer, Fujitsu, Packard Bell, Panasonic, Samsung


• Low earners:Advent, ASUS, E-Systems, Gateway, Maxdata, Medion, NEC, Philips, Sharp, Time, Tiny

The valuations of old laptops aren't particularly generous, and it's worth looking on eBay to see how much your old laptop would fetch first. It's also worth thinking about whether you want to get rid of your old laptop at all, as a second computer around the house is always useful.

That said, if you were about to dump an old laptop and buy a Toshiba laptop it's worth finding out how much money you can get.

Author: David Ludlow