Laptop spares priced not to sell

I just finished repairing an Inspiron 8500 laptop that had burned out its graphics card. As best I could tell repeated overheating of the graphics memory lead to it failing such that on boot they would see random patterns of colors all over the screen.

The owner was lucky they knew me because a round trip to Dell would have cost at least $200 -
in fact they don't even list the ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 card any more, but a suggested alternative nVidia card starts at $150. That was pretty much the standard price for a replacement graphics card, infact many places were $200 or more. By the time you add the cost to get it installed you're probably looking at $250 to $300 - at which point you might as well consider a new laptop.

As it turned out I was able to find a replacement on eBay for $45 (thank you Sunshine Express for the working part and super fast turn around shipping). With shipping and my installation fee it will only cost them $100 and the laptop was back in their hands in less than a week. With the money they saved I was at it I was able to get them some new memory for $40 doubling the capacity to 512Mb (a very worthwhile improvement for XP!). I was also able to find a neat free utility called i8kfan by someone in Germany who obviously also thought Dells BIOS settings for the Inspiron fans were very risque. If you have an Inspiron laptop you really should check out this little wonder, it does a great job of keeping your CPU and GPU cool and is very flexible - I'm hoping my client wont be coming back again to replace their graphics card.

Anyway, the point of this post is that most laptop spares online are priced ridiculously high relative to the current cost of replacement, it is a wonder that anyone ever sells any of them. So eBay is a great resource since there are many true recycled parts out there for sale that are perfectly good. Okay you are going to occasionally get a dud, or have to deal with a bad eBayer, but by and large it is probably the biggest thing between you and buying a brand new computer each time something fails. Your only other alternative is an expensive service contract with the manufacturer which by and large will cost you as much if not more than case by case repair (unless you get a real lemon!). Then again I guess not everyone is lucky enough to know me for repairing their computers - it would be very interesting to know what the Geek Squad or some other repairer would have made of their computer.