OT: Refurbished computers?

[Antonin]

Has anybody out there ever bought a refurbished computer? What was your experience with it?

I'm looking to get a new machine, partly to reward myself for some recent accomplishments. The wife is agreeable. But our money is tight. It is definitely time to upgrade--our current computer is 5 years old. We have a 400 MHz Win 98 machine with an 8 MB video card and a 20 G hard drive.

Micro Center has refurbished computers, at lower prices of course vs new ones. Perhaps one of those would fit our budget better than a new computer. Slap a 128 MB video card into it and a low-priced sound card... If it would last just a couple years until our financial situation gets better (ie, until I can find a better job)...

[Thermodyne]

Most are lease returns and are fine. Some are problem systems that people returned for replacement, stay away from these.

You can get a new Dell for about $450 these days, why risk a used system?

[Atrocities]

ALL OF HP COMPUTERS are refurbished. I once bought a new HP, had a problem with the cdrom, called tech support, gave them the correct information, verified twice, and was asked if I was Mr. Paris. - Um no.... - Seems that brand new PC I just bought from CompUSA was a refurbished and had been returned because of a bad CDRom by a Mr. Paris.

Months later and several problems systems later I am told by HP that they will send me a NEW pc. The one I have now. Six moths after getting it, the CD/RW stopped working. I called tech support and once again I discovered that my brand new PC was in fact a returned/refurbished system.

DO NOT BUY HP COMPUTERS!!!! You have been officially warned.

[Ed Kolis]

Mr. Paris? You should have sent him at Warp 10 into the Delta Quadrant to mate with a lizard, LOL!

[Renegade 13]

You have bad bad BAD luck AT! My parents bought an HP over 2 years ago, and have had no difficulty whatsoever, except that the CD-RW died a couple months back. But from what I understand, RW drives have a lower mean time before failure than a purely reading drive. So it wasn't horribly unexpected, just inconvenient.

[Kamog]

I think the HP computers we had at work didn't last very long because of problems. But our Compaq PC's have had even more problems.

[Atrocities]

Once the bad drive was replaced I have had rather good luck with this machine. The bad luck was in the service catagory. In order to get good service now a days you need to know how to speak Farsee (sp) or Arabic.

[Will]

That would be Farsi. But I'm not aware of any large numbers of support staff that have been outsourced to Iran or the Middle East. A lot of the more conservative segments of the Persian and Arabic populations still don't take too kindly to capitalist American influence Most of it is India, and even then, knowing how to speak Hindi probably won't help. A lot of people in India technically speak the same language, but don't understand each other because the dialects have shifted so much. So the common language between them all is English (good old fashioned colonial influence). You still have to put some effort into understanding the accent, but I've found that thinking of the speech as someone trying to talk with their tongue outside of the mouth helps.

[Antonin]

Thermodyne said:
You can get a new Dell for about $450 these days, why risk a used system?

Isn't Dell mail order only? I'm looking to get the best payment terms possible, so something I can get with a store credit card would be ideal. Six months same as cash, 24 months same as cash, etc.

Thanks for the info, guys. Unfortunately, all of the affordable computers in the stores here are either HP or Compaq.

Our current computer is a 400 MHz IBM Aptiva. I've had no problems with it.

I'm even thinking about just installing a 128 MB video card, just to stretch out the usefulness a bit and enable me to play Eve Online. Probably SE5 too will require more than my existing 8 MB video card.

How hard/easy is it to install a video card?

[Thermodyne]

I think Dell will finance systems.