What's the deal with unsearched penny rolls?

If you collect coins by now you may have come across unsearched coins. They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. You can find them in lots, sealed bags, sealed boxes, and in sealed or unsealed rolls. You may be wondering what are they and what does the seller of these mean by unsearched?

Unsearched means that it has not been sorted through by the seller (and possibly others) checking for dates, mint marks, errors, grades, etc.

It is possible to get unsearched coins a variety of ways. Here are some ways you can find unsearched coins:

1) Ebay - they truly have something for everyone whether it be rolls, bags, lots, you name it!

2) Banks - many people "roll hunt" through boxes of coins and after they're done take the coins to a free coin counter to get their money back for them. My fiance has done his fair share of roll hunting & actually found some nice coins!

3) Coin Dealers / Shows - many coin dealers sell coins (pennies, nickels, etc.) in bulk and often many of them do not search through them looking for key & semi-key dates. If you buy these in bulk and do the hard work of searching their loss may be your gain!

4) Craigslist and other types of community sites - many people try to sell their collections on sites like Craigslist and often don't know exactly what they're selling. This may be a great opportunity to get some nice coins for an amazing deal!

5) Estate Sales, Auctions, and Flea Markets - if you have any of these types of places around you, you may just get lucky and find some unsearched rolls or lots of coins up for sale. If someone is auctioning off their property or having an estate sale and they collected or hoarded coins you might hit the jackpot and get the opportunity to buy unsearched coins for some amazing prices, especially if these coins are being sold by someone not knowledgable in numismatics.

These are just some of numerous ways you can find unsearched coins. I'm sure there are even more ways, but these are just some that I can think of off the top of my head.

Once you get your hands on some unsearched coins you may be wondering, "what now?" My advice would be to purchase a 2010 or 2011 Red Book, which is an essential book for collector's to use to help determine the value of their coins. Also, if you're really interested in getting serious some other great books are The Cherrypicker's Guide and the Ana Grading Standards for US Coins. The first book is good for identifying errors in coins that you may come across and would be a good book to use if you're going through unsearched coins. The second book is a great book to help you determine the grades (condition or quality) of coins you find and would be helpful for when you look up the prices of what your coins are worth.

If you don't think you're quite ready to get that serious and aren't ready to invest in a book there are many websites dedicated to helping you determine prices and grades. Some of our favorites are:

PCGS Price Guide
Numismedia Price Guide
Coinsite Error Coin Price Guide
PCGS Photograde

The internet is a powerful tool and you can find out just about anything you need to know about a coin you are curious about. There are even forums dedicated to coin collecting with many knowledgeable people happy to give you advice on any questions you may have.

Before you start searching through your coins I suggest you take a little look through a price guide first just to get an idea of the dates of high dollar coins you should keep a look out for. Otherwise you might pass up on something that is worth a lot of money! Whichever avenue you choose to buy your unsearched coins I wish you the best of luck! I'm sure that even if you don't get the coin find of the century you will have a lot of fun searching for coins and that it will be an educational experience as well. If you have any children or grandchildren this could be a great hobby to share with them and may get them interested in collecting or history.

If you'd like to start out by searching through rolls we have some on our website for some great prices. Feel free to check them out and drop us a line if you'd like to make an offer on any. :-) Have fun & happy searching!

The solution to your cursor moving while typing on a laptop!

This might seem a little off topic for this blog, but for quite a while now I've been experiencing an annoying occurrence while typing on any one of our 3 laptops. Sometimes when I would write a whole e-mail to someone the cursor would all of a sudden highlight the whole conversation and then delete everything. Other times while quickly typing something important I would find my cursor had moved to another line in the paragraph and totally messed up what I was typing. 

My fiance, on the other hand, had not experienced this problem at all and I started to think I was either going crazy or that I was doing something wrong while typing. The only difference between our typing is that I type and he hunts and pecks  (quickly though, I must add). ;-) Today this moving cursor problem really got the best of me and irritated me more than usual. So, finally after all this time (I don't know what kept me from doing this all along) I did a Google search on it. 

Aha! Phew, I'm not the only one out there experiencing this problem! I found tons of forums with people trying to find the solution to this problem. It turns out the problem occurs when you are typing and inadvertently brush over the mouse touch pad. I hadn't realized I had been so close to it and done this, but now it made sense! The only problem now . . . finding a solution that will fix this! I found people with all types of solutions ranging from disabling the touchpad in between typing to using a USB mouse and disabling the touch pad permanently to changing the sensitivity setting of the mouse. I definitely didn't want to have to turn the touch pad on and off between typing as that would be extremely inconvenient plus I couldn't find out how to do that option anyway. Also, I didn't really want to have to get a USB mouse as that wouldn't fit on the laptop desk that I have. 

After several more searches on Google for more solutions to this problem I came across a program called TouchFreeze that automatically disables the touch pad for you whenever you type so the cursor can't jump around or click on anything. The specs says that it is for Windows NT, 2000, and XP, but I have Windows 7 and it works fine with this system. After typing this post I can successfully say that I've had no problems with typing or having my cursor move around. Thank you so much, TouchFreeze! You're a lifesaver!

If you're having this problem and want to download this program you can get it here: http://code.google.com/p/touchfreeze/downloads/list 

Enjoy!