How to Get the Best Price for Your Old Laptop

Most of what an old laptop is worth is decided by the machine itself, and you cannot change that. What is a five-year-old i5 is a five-year-old i5.

But a real part of it is decided by things you can change, and by one thing almost everybody gets wrong: how long the laptop sat in a cupboard before anybody thought about selling it.

This is the practical list. It is about what to do, not about what a laptop is worth — what actually moves the price is set out on the selling page, and repeating it here would not help you.

Sell it sooner than feels comfortable

A laptop loses value continuously, whether it is being used or not. Every month in a drawer, newer machines arrive, the generation it belongs to slides further down the list, and its battery quietly loses capacity even though nobody has switched it on.

The best time to sell a laptop is when you stop using it. Not when you get round to it. People keep a machine "in case it is useful", find it three years later, and are surprised by the offer — but the machine that would have fetched more was the one they had three years ago, and that machine no longer exists.

If it is sitting unused now, that is the whole point of this paragraph.

Know exactly what you are selling

This is the single most useful thing you can do, and it costs nothing.

"HP i5, 8 GB" describes hundreds of laptops from ten different years. Anybody pricing from that description has to assume the worse end of the range, because they are pricing uncertainty as well as hardware. A precise description removes that.

What to find:

• The model name and number. Usually on a sticker underneath, and often still readable. If it has worn off, on Windows press the Windows key, type System Information and open it — the model is on the first screen.
• The exact processor, which is on that same screen. Not "i5", but the full thing, like i5-8365U. That is what tells a buyer which year it is from.
• The memory and the storage — how much, and whether the storage is an SSD or a hard disk. Task Manager, under Performance, tells you both.
• Roughly when it was bought.

Write those down and send them with the photographs. It changes the quality of the answer you get.

Photograph it as if you were the buyer

Photographs are how somebody decides whether to spend time on your laptop at all. Four or five good ones are worth more than fifteen bad ones.

• Daylight, near a window, on a plain surface. No flash — it hides scratches and looks like it is trying to.
• The whole laptop open, screen switched on, showing the desktop. A photograph of a laptop that is switched off raises the obvious question.
• The keyboard, straight down, so wear is visible.
• The sticker underneath, close enough to read.
• Any damage, honestly and close up. This is the one people skip, and skipping it is a mistake. Damage is always found. Found in a photograph, it is a fact that was already priced in. Found at the counter, it undoes the trust for everything else you said, and the whole offer gets revised downward.

Copy your files off, then sign out, then reset — in that order

The order matters, and getting it wrong is the one mistake here that cannot be undone.

1. Copy everything you want to keep onto a pen drive or an external disk. Photographs, documents, downloads, anything on the desktop. Then check the copy actually opens, on another machine if you can.
2. Sign out of your accounts. Your Microsoft or Google account, your email, your browser, and anything that stores passwords. If the machine is signed in to a personal account, the next owner cannot properly set it up.
3. Then reset it, if you know how. Windows has "Reset this PC" in Settings, with the option to remove everything.

If you do not know how to do any of that, say so rather than skipping it — you are not expected to have wiped it yourself, and it is better asked than guessed at. What you must not do is reset first and copy afterwards. Afterwards, there is nothing to copy, and getting it back becomes data recovery rather than a file transfer.

Clean it, but do not disguise it

Twenty minutes with a soft cloth is the cheapest thing on this list and it changes how a machine is received. The screen, the keyboard, the palm rest where the shine is, the vents. A clean machine looks like a cared-for machine, and it usually was one.

There is a line, though. Cleaning is fair; hiding is not. Do not polish over a crack, do not photograph around a dent, and do not describe a machine as working perfectly if it does something odd once a week. Mention it. It will come out, and a small fault disclosed costs far less than the same fault discovered.

Find the charger

The original charger is worth having and a missing one is a real deduction, because whoever buys the laptop has to buy a replacement. Look properly before deciding it is lost.

The box, if you still have it, is worth keeping with the machine. So is anything else that came with it.

Do not repair it first

This is the least obvious advice here and it saves people the most money.

If the screen is cracked, or the battery is finished, or the keyboard has stopped, the instinct is to get it fixed so it sells for more. It almost never works out. You pay retail for the part and the labour, and the machine's value does not rise by as much as you spent — you have effectively bought a repair for somebody else.

Sell it as it is, described honestly, and let it be priced as it is.

The exceptions are the things that cost you nothing: cleaning it, charging it so it can be switched on and tested, and finding the accessories.

And if it does not switch on at all

It is still worth asking about. Machines that will not start are the ones people throw away, and they are frequently the ones with perfectly good parts inside — the memory, the storage, the screen, the body. Nobody can price one from a description, because until it is opened nobody knows whether it is the charging port or the board, but "it does not switch on" is not the same as "it is worth nothing".

Send photographs of it anyway. The selling page explains how that works.

If you are replacing it as well as selling it

Work out what you are replacing it with before you sell, not after — you want the old machine still working while you find out what you forgot to copy. The complete guide to buying a used laptop covers the other half of that, and it is worth reading before you commit to a budget, because what your old laptop is worth often changes what the new one needs to be.