So, I'm trolling around on eBay for an older laptop. Ideally, I'm looking for something I can upgrade to Windows 2000 for networking purposes, but really, any Pentium class computer with an OS installed (except for one that has the system requirements for 2K; I have a copy of that I can use) will work. My intentions are to use it almost exclusively as a word processor, so I'm very flexible here. As a result, I was checking out the lower end laptops.

Of cours, there are several laptops priced at a penny. Some of them don't work, some of them have no OS installed, but some of them are simply old enough to have no market value. As far as nonworking models, that's not necessarily a problem; it depends on what's wrong, but it's the old one's I'm most interested.

So, one laptop caught my eye. It was a Celeron PIII equivalent, and not a bad system. So I clicked on it to take a closer look. Being a veteran eBayer I know to ALWAYS look at shipping costs; this one wasn't specified.

I noticed someone had already plaed a minimum bid of $0.01. Which meant, of course, I would have to bid somewhere above that. So I headed on to the description. In the text of the article, the seller mentioned that $150 was the shipping and handling costs for the laptop because $150 was the minimum she would accept for the laptop.

Excuse me? Have you not heard of a reserve?

As I walked away from that seller wishing eBay had a way to mark sellers you never ever intend to buy from in the future so that you don't even think of bidding on their auctions, I kept thinking of that poor sucker who bid a penny, wondering if they read the "fine print", and quite happy I hadn't "tested the waters" by putting in a $1 or $2 bid as I've done in the past.

It's just a good reminder of the old axiom: always, ALWAYS read the fine print.