refurbished
 

I've always felt that factory refurbished electronics seemed like they'd be a very safe investment (not that I've ever purchased one). It seems to me that someone has tested the product, identified the problem, the factory has corrected the problem, so it's good to go. Is that crazy, or pretty accurate?

"Investment" is the wrong word, because they will never make money for you.

And it depends on the product. Maybe there is a product that is a piece of crap, like every external video capture device I've ever bought, and somebody returns it because it's complete crap, but it's as good as the day it rolled off the line, so they rebox it and sell it as refurbished. And it's still crap.

I've purchased a refurbished Dell laptop that was very good. It was just off lease.

I've had several refurbished electronic products. With very good results. I currently have a refurb Toshiba VCR/DVD combo, a Pioneer 1000 watt audio/video receiver, a Uniden police scanner, and 7" portable hdtv (brand unkown).

Excepting the tv, all are over 15 yrs old and have worked perfectly.

I agree. The refurbished item has received individual attention whereas the assembly line product has passed through several inattentive hands.

My laptop is a refurb. Works just dandy.

They say a lot of refurbs are from people who didn't know how to operate the thing in the first place, and returned it.

But then, they would say that, wouldn't they? That's just the sort of thing they'd say.

And probably some people get buyers remorse and just say the thing is broken so they can return it.

So is the consensus that electronic refurbs are generally a good deal?

I would say that if the item gets good reviews, and a refurb is available, the refurb is a good deal.

But a refurbed piece of crap is still a piece of crap.

Thanks, folks!

LCDDIGITAL?

Buyer Beware.

I would stick with resellers like overstock.com and Newegg to buy refurb equipment since it has some semblance of a warranty and has been serviced by a legitimate company.

I have bought from Overstock.com before and successfully returned refurb equipment. My home PC is a refurbished old Compaq desktop I got from Newegg with a full copy of Windows 7 x64.

Dell also offers refurbs, but I would not buy anything with an AMD processor from them as they had an issue with the processors overheating and melting.

I would not use Craigslist for this type of equipment. Unless you really need it, stick with other places.

No clue, man. It's in the top of the closet, and, you just don't want to go in there.:headshake

Agree with most of what is posted here. Do your research on the product as a new item. Check out the reputation of the seller. If you're happy with both of those, go for a refurb.

Apart from food, pretty much everything I buy is second-hand.
So not even refurb. And I can't remember a time I've been burned. Not literally of course, but also not be a second-hand item either.

I had my eye on something from Newegg.

Then I got home from work on Friday. My mother in law got a new laptop, and gave me her old one. It's an old HP pavilion "entertainment" unit, and I worked all weekend getting it running adequately, and adding the applications that I like. It still needs work.

Ram upgrades are easy and cheap and noticeable. Post the bios info and the serial number so the nerds can tell you what to do to it.

(I say 'bios info' as though I know what I'm talking about... But I might mean something else. The info you get when you interrupt the boot sequence, is what I'm after here.)... it tells you how much memory you have, etc....

My MIL wants me to buy her a refurbed Dell laptop on Ebay from the official Dell refurb store. They sell about 30 a day.

I've promised to buy one and load basic software on it (ninite!) and send it to her. I'm a little nervous. I don't want to be responsible if it sucks.

I don't like the idea of buying refurbished electronics because I'm.....ummm...a snob? I don't know. I have a fear of them dying on me.

If you buy her one, make sure it has an Intel processor. AMD in a Dell is a guarantee it will suck and make your family gatherings more awkward.

Thanks for the advice. I won an auction for a Latitude E6410 Intel i5 2.67 Ghz with 4GB RAM and a modest 160GB hard drive. Windows 7.

It was rated in very good shape ("A") and was just within her budget at $296.

I expect she'll be happy.

My Lenovo T400 Notebook Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz 3GB Memory 160GB HDD Integrated Graphics 14.0" Windows 7 Home Premium came yesterday. I'm looking forward to quicker, problem free performance. Now I just have to install all the stuff I'm used to and need. My photos and music are on a (very full) 80 gig external hard drive. I hope that'll be just a plug in kind of operation.

If you use iTunes for your music, you'll have to rebuild the library. If you use Picasa for your pictures, you'll have to rebuild your library. As for Picasa, I have some tips about how to use a helper program with Picasa, Picasa Starter, that I've found extremely useful for managing a collection of pictures that does not reside on the local machine.

In any case, your music (*.mp3 files) and your pictures (*.jpg files) are likely still on your external drive.

Looks just like my son's, spex. I got it from some mook at a pawn shop. He's brutal on electronic devices, but that thing has stood the beating. You'll be happy, I think.

Thanks for the tip

I'm looking forward to it

My new puter is a Lenovo thingy. We're still coming to terms with one another

Download resistanceisfutile.exe and click on Run.

I have a new one for work.

FYI they fucked up the trackpad on new models. You can push on it to click like on Apple laptops, but it has a cheap feel to it. No separate mouse buttons, right-click is now touch lightly with two separate fingers.

Change is bad.

I dunno, I kind of like that this doesn't crash every three seconds, take a stone age to start up or have a hard disk error thingy. Change is annoying, but so are teenagers and yet we still love them. just.

I just took possession of a used laptop off ebay.

What are all the cool kids downloading from ninite these days for basic web surfing protection? I hate the old laptop because it takes for freaking ever to do anything, and I blame in part the virus protection and malware protection for that. I don't want to load this machine with unnecessary stuff. So what do I need?

It's a windows 10 machine.

Thanks!

WIN10 comes with Windows Defender built in.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wind...nsive-security

Get a solid state disk first
 

The best thing you can do is get an SSD.

I bought one for $30 and it made an old laptop run like new!

Win10 will suck without one.

Cool. It has an SSD.

It's always a good day when mbpark pokes his head up!

QFT

and he's right.

Mitch!! http://cellar.org/2015/willy_nilly.gif

glatt, remember this?

May be worth checking the list, I remember Happy Monkey objected to one on the list.

You can put Alexa on your WIN10 laptop (free download from the Microsoft Store or Amazon). On fully compatible WIN10 models the most recent version of the app even works handsfree, like an Echo device, by using the wake word functionality. The battery in the laptop makes it a portable Alexa device.

Long before trying to fix it, first discover where the bottleneck is. Is a bottleneck durnig power up? Or during operation?

Reasons for a slow bootup include the so many programs that load then even though they are not (yet) being used. Such as Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Office. Microsoft's System Internals program called Autoruns can then identify and turn off that loading.

Bottlenecks during operation can be in CPU use, Page (memory) faults, IO faults, or so many TCP/IP connections during some internet access. Bottlenecks can be identified by Process Explorer. Too many Tcp/Ip connections by TCPview. All programs from Microsoft.

Some websites open connections to over 50 other URLs before the page fully loads. Closing or blocking those connections can massively increase execution speeds.

List of connections diverted to 127.0.0.1 attempts to divert many TCP/IP connections. Those can be closed by TCPview or can be eliminated by an IP blocker.

SSD is useful when the system has limited memory and is doing too many page faults to the hard drive. Doing those same page faults to the SSD is the equivalent of adding more memory. SSD solution works best when that is the bottleneck. But again, better is to identify the bottleneck long before implementing a solution.

If you use Skype or Hotmail, you probably don't want to block them.

Man... That guy is hard to read even when what he's sa is actually correct.