Mystery Laptop (Grade A Refurbished)

Mystery Laptop (Grade A Refurbished)

Man the idea of throwing 250 around and not knowing what you’re getting…

I like to gamble but that’s pretty fascinating, especially when the worst case scenario is an I-5 8th gen and a 720 p screen

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There’s also the MERMAID’S MYSTERY Waist Trainer.

It’s a mystery and you know what you’re getting.

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Definitely in this case the risk outweighs the reward.

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They must get a ton of returns on these types of sales. Almost seems it would be easier just to sell them with full specs listed.

Kenny Rogers Gambling GIF

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They are too old to sell to the average consumer, so they have to pawn them off on suckers.

There may have been a day and an age where a cheap older laptop may have well served an underprivileged youth well, but you can buy a brand new tablet that’s faster than these old machines.

I’ve railed against these sorts of “deals” in the past, so I’ll just say this: if you spend 10 minutes looking around you can find something comparable to the max possible specs for the price you’re gambling here. Woot needs to lower the price of these deals by at least $50 if not $100 in order for them to make sense. Save your money. Please.
Schitts Creek No GIF by CBC

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Yesterday I saw a deal on kitchen tongs. Max discount on the 5-pack brought pricing to just above $4/set. Even through sites that will sell you one case at a time, rather than requiring a pallet minimum or whatever, cost was under $2.

Bad tongs.
Bad pricing.

It’s so rare that I see a decent deal here, anymore.

It hurts that woot isn’t the classic closeout awesomeness it once was.

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Yeah, No. that’s a ripoff. Anyone who buys these and ends up with a laptop from wish deserves it.

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The last time I saw one of these deals here, I had just been laid off and my home desktop was about to die, so I was almost desperate enough to jump on a super-cheap mystery laptop from Woot.

But then someone in the comments linked to the Dell refurbished laptop site, and I got a nice little Latitude for $200 which is still serving me well (knock on wood). It’s been about six months so far. So anyway, I’m paying it forward.

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Seconded.

Last month I bought a Win11-capable Latitude i7 10th-gen, 16 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD, from Dell Refurbished for $300. It flies (coming from a 6th-gen i5). (This was a 50% off sale running during Prime Days, but I’ve seen 50% deals on select models there since.)

As a reminder, Latitude is their business-grade line – and I’d far rather buy an off-lease business-grade laptop than a new consumer-grade one.

That versus $250 for a crapshoot that might not even run Win11?

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the only laptop on the first page under $300 has an N processor and soldered in hard drive (64 gb which barely holds windows) and 4gb of soldered in memory. and an 11" monitor, its basically a netbook.
at least link somewhere like backmarket

I’m wondering if the link was intended to go to Dell Financial’s outlet store, which is dellrefurbished.com. About 70% of all the computers at my work come from there.

(Note that I am not staff. I just volunteer to help out on the forums.)

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I think you’re right.

Do they allow returns??

For some reason I guess I just rationalized in my head that if the product works that they wouldn’t let return it.

If the return policy is identical for the mystery packs then I guess there’s a lot less risk to buying them

But yeah it does seem kind of wasteful. If you think about all the gas that would be wasted. Sending the stuff back and forth around the country.

Because I mean who the hell is going to keep this thing if they are one of the unlucky ones with a 720 p.

Hi there. You have a 30 day return period in addition to the 90-day warranty.

Click here to see our return policy.

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I got lucky. A Dell Percision15.6 with 10key, i7-10th gen, 16gb, 256nvme, Quadro 2g video card - Everything worked great, did an offline account and upgraded it to Windows 11, perfect deal for an inlaw laptop.

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Damn, yeah if it was spec’ed that way would have bought for sure.

Honestly if they weren’t so “Russian Roulette” on these deals would buy more often. I wanted a new mid-high-end laptop but c’mon the minimal spec was dismal. Did once try an S&D iMac and case was so smashed in one corner I was surprised the screen was not cracked (yet… ) didn’t want to keep it that way and luckily return was easy.