"Mike Berger" wrote in message
...
It sounds like there's a good chance that it was fine until you
messed with it.

Well you could be right, but it seems at least a little unlikely. The PSU
is, or appears to be good, and everything else is onboard, including the CPU
and RAM. The only other possibility might be the battery, but I've never
heard of a battery pack having some kind of intermittant short through all
the cells (the battery, and everything else, was running ok for the ten
minutes.)

I hope you explain that to the Ebay seller too.

I told him it ran for 10 minutes, pretty much like I said here.

People complain if you sell something as-is when you insist that
it works, but then they want you to warrant their mistakes.

Sure, and it is an auction at the end of the day, but it's sold as working
and I'm not exactly trying to have him over. I have asked if I can meet him
half-way on a replacement, since he does have a few more up for sale.