I have one where I work and it has only enough space for a low profile gpu in it… they are a little tough to find some as there are not really a lot of low profile cards. PLus it does not have a high capacity power supply. 250 watt max
I have an aunt and uncle who use a computer for the basics. E-mail, news, facebook, banking. I’m looking for a simple computer with long term reliability. I assume any specs will work but was worried that this was refurbished. Anyone have an opinion on this or ideas to point me in the right direction. Thanks in advance
The first thing I bought from woot was a refurbished HP Elitebook 2570p back in July. It was refurbed by a small company and came with a 1 year warranty from them. The only issue I had was that I booted it and it prompted me for the windows 7 cd key and I couldn’t find it anywhere. I used the key from another copy I had, and all was well, but I was irked at the omission given the cost of an OS. Not irked enough to call the company, though. Few weeks later I took the battery out to upgrade the RAM and hard drive and found the CD under the battery which is actually quite common since they get worn away if located on the bottom of the case. Big “doh!” moment.
Otherwise I’ve loved the computer. It had small cosmetic defects like worn plastic around the edges, but it was otherwise completely cleaned and restored. New battery and power brick were Chinese knockoffs, but that’s okay at least they were new. Hard drive had 10,000 hours on it, but it was always my intention to replace it with a solid state drive, and as elaborated below, lots of hours are not necessarily a problem for reliability. Japanese hard drives are like Japanese cars and just start getting broken in well after the first decade or so.
These business desktops are generally built to last. I’m honestly surprised that so many almost-NEW (<1 year old technology) refurbished ones show up on here because most companies only upgrade every 2-5 years. Some go even longer without change. Think of these desktops like the ubiquitous Jaguar-platform Crown Victoria sedans that have been used for over 20 years for police cars. The cops use them (and ABUSE them) for about 100k miles. Then cab companies buy them used and drive them out well past 300k.
This machine uses a 3rd generation Core i7 processor which is about 4 years old now. My laptop also uses this generation of processors. It was the first to support USB 3 and that was a must-have feature for me.
I really wish I was in a position to buy one of these Dells right now. I’ve been scouring Woot for a small or micro computer for under $250 with a decent processor and USB 3 to use as a Plex media server. I can find many in the $300-400 range, including some VERY nice micro desktops (smaller than a hardcover book) that have current-gen Intel processors and use the same HP power supply as my laptop (I just picked up an extra real HP one from Woot a month ago for about 15 bucks).
This computer would be more than sufficient for virtually any task short of gaming or other graphics-intensive tasks. The integrated graphics in this generation of Intel processors was a big step up, and my laptop renders 1080p video and everything else I throw at it with 0 issues. This is well over twice as powerful as my laptop. Two years ago I upgraded my grandmother’s ancient eMachines tower with all new internals. She (rather, GeekSquad, at enormous cost) had already replaced the failed stock power supply with a beefier, reputable 450W Antec years earlier, so it could handle new components, and I was comfortable about its reliability. With her uses of e-mail and basic web browsing in mind I built a machine for about $400.
This is more than 4 times as powerful, has twice as much hard drive space, twice as much RAM, it takes up less space, uses less power, and I built hers myself with inexpensive, dated, entry-level components. Good value.
To actually address your concerns: I personally am not bothered at all by the fact that it’s refurbished EXCEPT that it comes with Windows 10 which I still do not like. I would expect it to perform reliably 24/7 for 5 years. The processor, motherboard, and RAM are unlikely to ever fail unless damaged by water/lightning, etc. The wear/tear components are the power supply, hard drive, and the fans. Fans and hard drives are dirt cheap (although the latter will be rising in price for the next year at least). A failed hard drive also means lost data if not backed up, though, so the consequences can be significant even if not economically. As mentioned the hard drive in my laptop has quite a few hours on it as displayed by various utilities (Crystal Disk Info, HDTune, SpeedFan, et al.), but it is a commercial-grade Hitachi that I expect to last many more years. I have some Western Digital Raptors from 2004 with 100,000 hours on them (nearly 24/7/365 for their whole lives). If I were to buy this computer for my grandmother, I would investigate the usage and health of the hard drive using these utilities, and depending on the results I would buy a solid state drive to replace it and have it back up to the old 500gb spin drive, or I’d buy an external hard drive and set it up to make a backup regularly. Given how inexpensive storage is now and how USB 3 is fast enough to allow externals to work at full speed, there is no excuse not to have at least 1 extra copy of important data. Also note that the mechanical spinning hard drive is by FAR the slowest thing in this computer. After becoming used to fast spinning drives and solid states, using a drive like this feels very sluggish to me regardless of how powerful the hardware is. They make a profound difference on overall “feel” of performance. Notice the ones with solid state drives are already sold out; ironically I would REALLY rather NOT buy a used solid state drive since they are still much less reliable, especially older ones as their controllers are poor at storing data in an efficient way. Even new, pricey, commercial-grade ones have a maximum expected life about 20% that of a conventional disk drive. They also invariably lose data if left unpowered for more than a few months as an intrinsic property of their physical design. I personally will NEVER depend solely on a solid state disk for important file storage. Note that this spontaneous data corruption also occurs in USB sticks and ANY form of flash memory left unpowered (SD cards, phones, tablets, literally everything). I’ve only recently learned about this phenomenon, and sure enough I dug out an old, disused USB drives and some of the files are broken. Storage temperature directly accelerates this effect as it increases beyond room temperature.
I would also look at the fans to see if they are original. I expect some of the refurbs have new fans but most to be original and simply cleaned of dust. I have had 1 hard drive and 2 power supplies fail in my life, but over a dozen fans have bitten it in the same timeframe, some quite expensive and reputable. Production machines use Chinese sleeve bearing fans that may last 20 years or 20 minutes, getting louder as they head toward their doom. Failure of any fan other than the one in the power supply would NOT be catastrophic. Even if the CPU fan fails the CPU will underclock to protect itself from overheating. The heatsink alone is enough to passively cool it, and an average user wouldn’t even notice the performance loss with a processor this powerful. Power supply fan failure can lead rapidly to a failed power supply which can have consequences ranging from mysterious generic issues (freezing, restarting, even bluescreens of death!) to every component in the computer being fried by excessive power (this is very rare, though, due to design. Generally failures cause little to no damage, and generally they are partial failures causing the aforementioned symptoms.)
Power supplies can be tricky for these small form factors; that’d be a slight concern. I haven’t seen the guts of a production desktop in many years, but they used to all have different sizes and shapes of power supplies for these small form factor computers. Dell in particular had proprietary parts even in a regular tower in friend’s 2008 machine. I suspect these smaller power supplies are largely standardized now and sourcing a replacement would not be expensive or arduous. ATX standards have made virtually every brand of every computer component inter-operable.
TL;DR: Great computer for the price. I would feel comfortable buying it for my mother/grandmother/anybody (myself included). Businesses often use computers for over a decade. The IRS still does our taxes on a 70s mainframe. Therefore business computers are built to last lest the reputation of the manufacturer suffer or failures lead to lost contracts in the future. Feel free to ask me further questions or to purchase and send me one of these machines for closer inspection.
For those tasks, almost any computer these days can suffice.
Typical with many of these refurbished business computers, they were previously leased units. After about 3 years, they are returned and gone through by a third party company. Although older, business computers in general are built for long-term reliability and serviceability, not cutting-edge specs. Comparably, storage is on the smaller side on these, the optical drive is read-only, and if you need wi-fi, you will have to add that yourself.
A refurbished business laptop I purchased through woot was indeed serviced and sold by a small third party company. The specs indicated that it had a DVD-ROM drive, and that was a possible option for this machine, though rare. It turned out to be a normal DVD burner. I notice many listings say DVD-ROM, but I expect most of them actually have DVDRW drives simply because read-only drives are very rare now. Certainly some industries could benefit from read only drives to protect sensitive data, but I work for a contractor that requires federal security clearance and both of my laptops (one from the company, one from the government) have burners. So do everyone elses’ computers, spanning multiple brands and many dozens of models/years/revisions; in fact optical media is the only way we are allowed to physically, locally store/backup/transport data. A phone or USB stick plugged into a computer is utterly prohibited. I can’t even wear my fitbit. I’m sure this varies by company, but most have probably just accepted that all optical drives are burners now and if data control is really that necessary it can be accomplished by unplugging the drive / disabling it / deleting its drivers / training and/or threatening your employees about export control. The bluetooth and fingerprint scanners in my machine lack drivers and are disabled in device manager to prevent their use.
Also the cell card was removed from my refurbed laptop and its antenna leads wrapped with a bit of masking tape. One of the screws that held down the card was rattling around in the general area. Luckily they’re anodized and unlikely to fry anything. Still, somebody oops’ed. Dunno why they took the cell card out since it probably got trashed. Doubt they were reselling them, it might just more of a quality control / consistency thing. Would’ve been a pleasant surprise to find one that happened to work for my carrier in there even if I’m too cheap to even consider WWAN.
Thank you for replying to my post. I went ahead and pulled the trigger and made the purchase. Now I just have to pray it is a reliable PC so that I don’t get blamed for future problems.