Guess I misunderstood "Refurb..."

[katz]

Ordered a Win 7 "Refurb" box from that popular online store that we all purchase from - the one with the breakfast food in the name...

This is for an elderly gent, his demands are little for the system, so we went for a "DELL Desktop Computer OptiPlex 740 Athlon 64 X2 2.0 GHz 4 GB 500 GB HDD Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit". This is not from one of their marketplace sellers, this is a genuine store product.

Upon arrival, the first thing I notice is a major dent in the big power button...I opened the case to take a look at what they may have done inside...

It is a major crud fest in here. The cooling fans are caked with baked on dust, a layer of dust on everything, a total mess. The CMOS battery reads 2.50 volt. And the kicker is that it has a 300 GB HD instead of the 500.

I informed the client of all of this. He thinks about it for a bit, and asks me if I can clean it up and make it useable, as he already waited a week and is anxious to use it. So I did just that; Cleaned it from top to bottom, new CMOS batt., reseated memory, connectors, etc.

Booted it up & tested the HD, results are good. Booted to Windows, finished the install & personalized it with his programs, data, etc. He's been using it a week, no issues so far.

Have any of you had any experiences with the refurbs from online retailers? I've purchased a few in the past and I've never encountered anything like this. I haven't contacted the company, but I think I will just to give them this feedback on this item.

 

[sapphirescales]

There are a ton of crappy refurbishers out there. If it's super cheap, that's probably why. I've gotten computers with missing parts, the drivers not installed correctly, bad sectors on the hard drive, you name it. And these people are selling to the general public too! I can't imagine a regular Joe off the street buying one of these and being satisfied with it. Then again, some people's computers are so slow and crappy when they come in for repair, almost anything would seem better to them.

The lesson to be learned here is make sure to find a decent refurbisher and try to buy from them whenever possible. Computers that have been refurbished PROPERLY by a good refurbisher are more money, but it's worth those few extra dollars to get something decent that you know has been refurbished properly rather than deal with crap like this.

 

[nlinecomputers]

Did you buy from Newegg or one of the many 3rd parties that sell through Newegg? Any idiot can sell through NewEgg. Just because NewEgg is the billing facilitator doesn't mean it is quality.

 

[seedubya]

Did you buy from Newegg

I think that may have been the "breakfast food" reference.

 

[katz]

Did you buy from Newegg or one of the many 3rd parties that sell through Newegg? Any idiot can sell through NewEgg. Just because NewEgg is the billing facilitator doesn't mean it is quality.

From the Egg themselves, not one of their 3rd party sellers.

This is what concerns me so much. I would maybe expect this from a 3rd party, but not a reputable seller. I've bought several refurbs from other online retailers and also ebay, and none of them were in the condition that this was, let alone the misquoted HD size.

I would have sent it back, but the client wanted it "now", so that's why I set it up for him & out the door with it.

 

[Slaters Kustum Machines]

I use CDI Computers out of Canada. As long as you don't buy the cheapest units they have, quality is good. Takes about 2 weeks to get machines to Iowa. My rep is Kenneth Lau, he's been great for us. We dropped Badegg altogether after a HDD RMA disaster.

 

[myleso]

We have had customers bring in refurbished computers they have purchased that had pirated windows 7 and even malware on them, nothing surprises us anymore when we get a customers refurbished unit for a data transfer or new computer setup.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I have worked on tons of computers clients have gotten from vendors as "refurbs"....including from NewEgg, TechSoup, various eBay stores.

Results can certainly vary. Some orders have come in "no bad". Other orders have come in....horrible, requiring lots of work. The amount of work we had to put into them sometimes offsite price savings the client "thought" they'd have by ordering refurbs instead of brand new.

 

[brandonkick]

I've had decent success getting machines off of ebay.

I recently picked up some Dell desktops for the $150
price point.... core i5, 500GB HDD, 4GB ram, win 7 PRO.

Good little machines, the drives were DOD wiped so
I did a clean fresh install, installed all the drivers, transferred
data and customized. It was $300 out the door to the customer
and they got way more of a machine then they would have ever
have had if they went to best buy and or walmart.

Look for some ebay sellers that have good reputations.

 

[SAFCasper]

We have a great refurbisher at the moment. Based about 50 miles away from us... they specialise in refurbishing computers and nothing else. They are also a Microsoft Authorised Refurbisher, of which there are less than 25 companies in the UK, so I imagine it's fairly strict.

Most devices have minor scuffs and scratches but nothing substantial... and purely cosmetic. Inside the casing they are always immaculate. To the extent I have actually questioned the owner on how they clean them... he laughed and said "Trade Secrets"

All devices have a warranty period of 1 year, extendible to 3 years at a reasonable cost. The warranty is our biggest selling point.

On top of this... we get a small trade discount and they offer a rebate program.


Prices are higher than what you find on eBay etc... but it's worth it to have a reliable supplier. Plus that 3-year warranty sells like hotcakes.

 

[TechLady]

You just have to be really, really careful, especially if you're dealing with the Bay of E. But warranties on new ones have gotten so lame lately I don't think they're much better than the ones on refurbs really, so why waste a ton of money on brand-new? I've seen plenty of new ones have troubles right out of the box.

 

[Andrew Orth]

I

I've had decent success getting machines off of ebay.

I recently picked up some Dell desktops for the $150
price point.... core i5, 500GB HDD, 4GB ram, win 7 PRO.

Good little machines, the drives were DOD wiped so
I did a clean fresh install, installed all the drivers, transferred
data and customized. It was $300 out the door to the customer
and they got way more of a machine then they would have ever
have had if they went to best buy and or walmart.

Look for some ebay sellers that have good reputations.

I'm very interested in starting to do exactly this kind of thing at my store. Do you find it best to purchase machines for refurbishing one at a time or do you ever look for the "lots" of identical machines on Ebay? It seems to me that might be the way to go.

 

[brandonkick]

I



I'm very interested in starting to do exactly this kind of thing at my store. Do you find it best to purchase machines for refurbishing one at a time or do you ever look for the "lots" of identical machines on Ebay? It seems to me that might be the way to go.

I work as a software engineer primarily, that is my main source of income. The computer repair stuff is just a side hobby for me mostly, and a little extra spending money. I give you that as a bit of a precursor to the next statement which is I do them one at a time.

If I did this as a hobby, starting off of ebay might not be bad but I'd try to get some connections with some decently sized corporations or educational facilities. Some colleges turn their machines around on a fairly often basis.... every year or every other year. If they can buy in such a quantity, they get great prices and even after they resell the old ones the cost of staying new is often very little. Keeping that new on good business grade hardware saves a lot of headaches and results in having some really nice hardware for the students / faculty to use.

The idea behind buying in bulk is you want business grade stuff, and you want to get a lot of the same machine. That serves a few purposes. You can set up one machine, image it and then deploy the clone to all the rest of the machines. Saves such an incredible amount of time vs setting up each machine one by one, installing windows, drivers, windows updates, software, one by one. It can take upwards of 6 hours to set up an OS properly. Simple math lends that if you do that for 100 machines, you've got 600 hours of putzing around. Yes, a lot of it is "waiting time" like waiting on windows updates to finish but deploying a clone is literally a 5 min or less hands on time investment and then you can flat out ignore the machine for an hour until it's done. Setting it up the traditional way, there's a dozen or more times where your presence at the keyboard is required for clicking "OK" or "I Agree" on stuff. Doesn't allow you to really focus on other work, otherwise after two hours you think windows updates is pretty far along and you come back to see you forgot to click "OK" on the service pack installer and nothing happened in that two hours.

Another reason it's nice to buy in bulk is because if you do get a bunch of the same machines, you know have a lot of spare parts. Suddenly machines with bad parts turn into machines that can donate a bunch of parts to other machines. At the very least, you have a bunch of machines that can be used to source "test hardware" if you need it. Got a machine that the wireless isn't working? You can pop the wireless card out of another machine that does work and try it. No need to guess and purchase replacements until your sure you know what hardware is bad.

The last thing isn't an exact "reason" so to speak, it wouldn't be true in every case but in most cases when you buy machines used in significant quantities, they are good business grade machines. Most places that order in bulk do not get them from walmart. They get them from a dell, hp or lenovo reseller for credit purposes usually as they can easily finance. Most of these partners push the business grade stuff for reasons like the warranty. The OEM (dell, hp or lenovo) usually offer great warranties and in turn they tend to build the business machines behind those warranties pretty well. If they have to honor the warranty, and they can't shove you off to someone in a third world country, and will need to overnight you parts... they want to be sure that the occurrences of you needing to use that support are small. The more that machine "just works", the less money they spend in honoring warranties. When your having to pay someone in america to give you tech support, and you have to overnight parts, the cost in honoring warranties can be significant. That results in some pretty reliable hardware in your business machines.

 

[Andrew Orth]

Wow, lots of really good information and advice there! Thanks for taking the time to respond, this will be very useful