by: evilfantasy
For the home user you can also get some really good deals buying refurbished these days. They have the same warranty as if they were new and are refurbished/guarantied by the manufacturer. Nothing wrong with that IMO.
Very true, a business that I use to support the IT for which was a not-for-profit Cooperative Food Store and couldnt afford to buy 40 brand new workstations to replace HP Desktop Vectra Pentium 133, 166 & 200Mhz computers running NT4 and Windows 2000 Pro SP4 went thr route of buying good refurbs. This would have cost about $20,000+/- (est. $500 per computer) in 2008 to replace these systems with brand new computers and they bought HP Certified Refurbs to save a lot of money. ( around $15,000 saved )
Tiger Direct had deals for Refurbished Pentium 4 2.8Ghz HP (SFF) Small Form Factor desktops with 512MB RAM, 80GB HDD, and DVD ROM, running Windows XP Professional for just $125 each which also came with a 3 month warranty.
If we had to buy Windows XP Professional the pricetag for just the OS at the time was like $139.99. I showed this deal to the Director of IT, who then showed it to the GM, and it was an easy sell to get computer upgrades as well as the Windows XP Pro operating system was cheaper bundled with these systems than buying XP Pro OS alone, so it was like buying the OS at discount and getting the refurbished computers for free.
We ended up buying 40 of these to replace all computers that were 10+ years old and this increased productivity of the users not having to wait for programs to load etc as well as the calls to IT help desk slowed drastically with problems in which the most common remedy was try rebooting and if it happens again someone will visit the user. Users and management were both getting frustrated with how frequent these aged and tired systems most of which had been on 24/7/365 for almost 10 years were acting up frequently.
We were able to replace all 40 systems with far more powerful computers for around $5000. A great Tiger Direct corporate sales rep, Mike Wooten, gave us a quantity discount so we got them even cheaper at like $119.99 each + shipping for buying 40 of them.
They are still using those systems today and they got a good 5 years out of them so far. All 40 are still running without problems. New management took over in 2009 and I left, but I still have contacts there in marketing etc that I stay in the loop with to get inside info on the health of the IT etc and offer free advice to them. They plan on using these systems beyond April 2014 when XP is no longer supported since many of these computer uses now use server side processing via Citrix client connection to servers.