Mismatched serial nos., specs etc.

[tiorapatea]

Oh dear, another sinking feeling from frequenting that famous auction site.

I have received a T60 with a serial of 2008-Y57 on the base, a serial of 2007-F4G in the BIOS and a motherboard with GMA950 integrated graphics. According to Lenovo's product number checker, this should not be possible.
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... ry=2008Y57
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... ry=2007F4G

The vendor is saying he thinks the machine is just ex-corporate and that he hasn't done any Frankenpad fabrication.

Is this possible? Does this matter? The machine was or could be cheap, as the vendor has offered me a rebate to take it down to £125 delivered ($196 at today's rates), or a return with postage reimbursed.

This is for a machine with a 100GB Seagate 7200 rpm disk, a single stick of 1GB RAM, and SXGA+ screen in reasonable condition (no dead pixels, one slight flaring/pressure mark near the bottom left). It has only the 32-bit Yonah 1.83 GHz CPU, but I could upgrade to a T5600 for £25 or a T7200 for ??? if I want to go 64-bit. It even passed Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage, although there is no recovery partition. Cosmetically, it appears OK, although when I removed the palm rest to check the RAM, it did feel very flimsy - is this normal? The part number for the palm rest was 26R9377 #2-2. There were lots of scratches on the underside, as if somebody had been doing a lot of scraping - why? Another thing bothering me is that the stickers on the bottom are all very worn, and one of them is covered in Greek lettering (why Greek, when I am in the UK, dealing with a UK-based seller?).

I went for a T60 because I just want a trouble-free machine for my mother for light use - browsing, email etc. It is close to Christmas, and this is supposed to be her present. Should I return it? I'd rather avoid the hassle in a way, and the difficulty of finding another SXGA+ at this price.

What would you do?

Is there any other cross-checking I can do, e.g. with the system board no. or the UUID or something?

[Harryc]

What would i do? If the machine was in otherwise excellent condition, and I needed an Intel machine I would keep it. The warranty is not an issue right?

[tiorapatea]

What would i do? If the machine was in otherwise excellent condition, and I needed an Intel machine I would keep it. The warranty is not an issue right?

Thanks for replying, HarryC, I value your opinion very highly on this! You're right, warranty is not an issue.

The Intel thing seems like it has pros and cons, less heat, more battery life (but this machine won't really be used on battery I shouldn't think), but obviously it would eat into system RAM and there will be lesser performance for 3d stuff, e.g. Aero - but I'm not too sure whether I will install Win7 at this stage.

[RealBlackStuff]

Even if you would install W7, you can run it in Classic Mode (i.e. W2K/XP lookalike).
As it's for your Mam, I would keep it, and only add another 1GB RAM to it.
She'll be grand with that!
Never mind wasting money on a CPU upgrade...

[tiorapatea]

As it's for your Mam, I would keep it, and only add another 1GB RAM to it.
She'll be grand with that!
Never mind wasting money on a CPU upgrade...

My T60 actually has 4GB installed, so I'm thinking of donating one of my 2 gig sticks in exchange for the 1 gig in this "new" machine. The CPU idea is more that I was thinking of standardising on Windows 7 64-bit for any family machines capable of it. However, I think on balance I will stay 32-bit on any T60s that come my way.