I caved and bought 1 of these because I’m broke and am in desperate need of a new laptop, even though I know buying refurbished stuff from Woot is never a good idea. I really hope I didn’t screw myself over on this.
These are essentially portable workstations targeting folks doing design work such as engineers and architects – hence the GPU and 32GB of RAM, but only a 256GB of storage. Most will be working with their files stored on a network and/or cloud; the local drive is primarily just for the applications.
If you’ll be spending a lot of time unplugged, expect to be disappointed. These processors are closer to a desktop in power and energy consumption.
(Note that I am not staff. I just volunteer to help out on the forums.)
i don’t think i mind the smaller drive too much, this thing has a 2nd m.2 slot so additional storage can be added down the line if needed. looks like each slot has 2tb max so I can get up to 4tb of storage in this thing if i want to get wacky. it’s also got 2 ram slots and the amount that’s currently in it is only half the max so I can get silly with that too.
I bought one during the last sale; it took like a week to ship but after it was finally released it took perhaps just another day to arrive.
It came in overall good condition, clean, and with the advertised specs. 1 of 2 m.2 slots populated, and 1x 32 GB DIMM, with a 2nd slot open; I guess that’s good if you planned to upgrade to 64 GB of RAM, but I’d have preferred 2x 16 GB modules, otherwise it’s not a big deal. It’s not particularly big or heavy for a 15" workstation; it’s pleasantly about as portable as your going to find (I think) for this class of device.
The only problem was that someone, either the previous owner or the refurbisher, apparently opened it up and then inserted the wrong screws in the front (the 3 in the back, near the hinge, are longer than the two in the front, and also, the 2 screws that came in the front are of different lengths for some reason,) which dented the wrist rest area. I don’t think it punched through anything important, thankfully, but it’s really disappointing especially because the laptop works fine and otherwise is in good shape. I already contacted Woot CS so we’ll see what happens from there.
was yours grade A refurbished, or grade C scratch and dent? if it was grade A i would definitely say something to CS about it, but if it was grade C then i would probably be a bit disappointed but then just live with it
also, mine shipped out already, like a day after I purchased, but it’s shipping from Cali and I live in CT so it’s going to take a loooooong time to get to me.
It’s Grade A. It’s definitely a shame because it’s otherwise very clean. I’m going to play around with it a little more, then I think I’m going to keep it and take the discount.
what kind of discount did they offer you, if you don’t mind me asking. whatever they offer you better be the difference in price between the grade A and grade C plus a bit more for trying to pull 1 over on you by selling you a grade C at grade A price
a few years ago they had a huge refurbed game console sale so I bought a WiiU. when it arrived it had obvious signs of dried liquid spilled all over the top of the case and I kept getting disc errors whenever I tried to read a game disc so it was obviously not refurbished. looking trough the forums for that sale at the time it was full of others posting about similar issues, I’m almost 100% sure they were all just previous amazon sales that were returned and they turned around and resold them w/o inspecting them at all. their favorite phrases here are ‘clearing out amazon inventory’ and ‘we don’t have eyes on the items’
I contacted CS and told them about the issues and told them it was going to cost me $x.xx to get the disc drive replaced. they responded back that they would either refund me the amount of the disc drive replacement or i could return it for full refund. other than the disc drive the rest of the system seemed to work fine so I opted for the discount
that is why I’m a bit concerned about buying this ‘refurbished’ laptop. it would be 1 thing if it was just me that had an isolated issue but that whole game console sale was a disaster for every user who bought something and it kind of turned me off buying anything refurbished from woot.
I desperately need a new laptop though and I’m broke so thats why I caved and got this 1. the other laptop I was contemplating was a new HP but it was almost $200 more and is marketed as an AI laptop which I wasn’t all that thrilled about to being with.
FYI, here is an article on the HP support site about the specs for this model
https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/ish_4140726-4140628-16
The option is to keep it but get a 30% partial refund off the original purchase price. I think that’s probably a fair offer, as a hedge against any future issues with this laptop due to the damage, and since if I exchanged it it’d be a dice roll as to whether the replacement was any better.
I should clarify: I’ve purchased refurbished electronics before, and as far as laptops go, other than the aforementioned damage due to the reassembly error, this is about as good as it gets, in terms of the overall wear and tear & the cleanliness of it. That’s why it’s such a shame that it has this one (two) blemish. As far as smartphones go, I’d avoid refurbs (from Woot at least) because they essentially always come with heavy wear.
As far as your laptop situation goes, do you specifically need a workstation like this one, with a professional GPU, for 3D work? If so, I think this is a good deal. If not, there are regularly deals on new consumer laptops in the $500 range. Typically these are ones with the first-gen Snapdragon X SoCs, which are absolutely sufficient for general-purpose use, even via x86 emulation, but there are also models with the Intel Core Ultra or Ryzen AI CPUs. Often these go on sale at Best Buy, and sometimes you can find lightly-used returns offered at a significant discount. I’d keep an eye on the Buildapcsales and Laptopdeals subreddits if you’re interested.
30% is a fair discount, good descision.
I don’t really NEED it for like work or anything, but I use a laptop as my daily computer so I like the fact that it has a dedicated video card and the possibility to upgrade storage and ram down the road. My current laptop is an Intel core i5-3337U with 16gh ram. Win10 was slow as hell on it even after upgrading the spinning disc hdd for an ssd, and it is way too old to run win11 so I installed Linux mint on it but even mint is starting to get a bit laggy on it so it’s desperately time for an upgrade.
I have been ripping my physical media for a while now to build up a media server and the only PC I have to do it with is a 12yr old desktop PC so it’s a slow process. This laptop might help to speed up the process when I’m not using it for other things.
Oh wow, you weren’t kidding, that CPU is ancient! The ZBook will absolutely be a huge upgrade over both the old laptop and desktop, and considering you basically describe using it as a desktop replacement, I think you actually made the best choice here.
lol
does anybody have experience with the Asurion warranty? is it worth getting? looks like it’s $57.99 for this laptop to get 3 years of coverage after the Woot 90 day warranty expires, I’ve never dealt with this company before so not sure how reputable they are..
laptop arrived. I just quickly looked it over and it does seem very clean. I saw a few small areas along edges that show some cosmetic wear but other than those it looks brand new. There was no response when I tried to turn it on so I guess the battery is completely drained. lets hope its just drained and not completely dead. its charging now so I will test it later tonight.
Ok, battery charged up ok.
I had an old Lenovo lying around I bought at Goodwill like 5 years ago but was never able to use because the drive was bitlocker enabled and I didn’t have the key. I found some info online last night about how to format a bitlocker enabled drive if you don’t have the key that I wasn’t able to find back when I bought that laptop so I pulled out that drive and popped it into the 2nd m.2 slot in the ZBook and was able to get it formatted so now so have a 512gb secondary storage drive in my new laptop.
I’ve been using Linux since MS ended support for Windows 7 so I have had very limited Windows experience since then. The first thing I did when I turned it on was boot into audit mode and ran the Windows decrapifier from Spiceworks to strip out as much of the tracking and bloat that I could.
After that I did all the Windows updates and then set up my MS account.
I installed Steam and downloaded Fallout 4 to test it out. After about 30 minutes of play it did get a bit warm but the game looked amazing and performed really well.