Dang that sucks.
Yes, it sucks.
I even got an attorney friend of mine to intervene to no avail. The seller was a total POS.
Back then, I was purchasing PowerBooks for people in different professions, most of whom had little or no experience with Macs. The PowerBook G3s were all the rage then. I'd do things like clean them up, add RAM, add a DVD drive (not all of them came with one, and they weren't cheap), and recommend software purchases for them based on their needs. When I was done with the PowerBooks, I'd teach them how to use the Mac OS. It was a great deal of fun for me, and my customers were always satisfied.
The case I described earlier was the second time I got screwed on eBay around that time. All in all, I did pretty well on what became a side job. My clients new what they were paying for, and we always easily agreed on a final price for each PowerBook.
(An incredible anomaly at that time: Combo CD/DVD drives were going off as high as $800 on eBay, typically closer to ~$650-$700. And the PowerBook G3s were considered THE laptop on which to watch DVDs. One of the Mac-centric resellers was offering them for ~$100, and I never had any idea why this was so. I bought a bunch of them and either added them to PowerBooks I was selling, or offered them on eBay for auction. This wasn't my finest moment, but I was working two jobs because I was doing a great deal of pro bono work and needed to find a way to pay my bills. I imagine that most people weren't doing very much research about items they wanted to purchase at that time, and the drives typically were sold by resellers for around the price they paid on the auctions.)
In my experience, it's much safer today on eBay, if you know what you're doing. It's much more difficult for someone to screw you, and many of the deals for pre-owned Macs are very good. Yet many of the asking prices are also tremendously unrealistic.
That being said, I'd much prefer to test out any unit that interests me before paying for it. You just never know.
