Go easy: Rent a laptop

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Have you ever just wanted to say “screw the store, I’m going to rent a laptop”? If you haven’t, you might want to try one of these days. Renting a laptop has never been easier. With the advent of companies such as Rent A Center, the options available to you are many. You can rent these laptops for as little as $10-$20/month, but you have to do your homework before you pull the trigger. Many of these “rent to own” schemes actually cost you a heck of a lot more in the long run than if you had bought the laptop outright. I spoke about this in my previous post about laptop rental a while back as well. You’re not doing yourself any favors by going to the big companies, let me tell you.

But what about going to a local company that may be more “in tune” with your local community? Those may actually have better deals that allow you to rent a laptop computer for much less long-run cost than the bigger competition. Rent A Center doesn’t have anything on some of the Mom and Pop stores that are running around these days. How should you find those types of stores? Easy: Go online and do a quick Google search. Google is your best friend when it comes to this. You can try to do a search such as “[city] rentals” or “[city] electronics rentals” in order to get some local listings in your local area. Any of the search engines will also be able to give you directions to the location, as well as listings of the websites. There you can often get online quotes, or possibly even get a phone number to call to discuss the rental terms. Easy, huh?

What kinds of laptops are available for rental? That depends on what type you want. If you want something higher-end, you may have a bit of a problem. Those types of laptops are often not in stock in a rental environment. Those either get taken up quickly, or the rental company doesn’t carry it. There’s no need to stock high-end laptops when most of the people who are doing the renting can’t really afford to buy a really nice system to begin with.

So, that about covers it for this topic. I definitely wanted to warn you about the pitfalls of renting a laptop before you just went out and did it, as convenient as it sounds on paper. Thanks for reading.