Recently I saw a large number of used Chromebooks for sale online for under $50. So at $27 each I decided to buy 2 of them as they were guaranteed to work, but they have scratches and minor defects.
Seller online said they were power washed, however 1 of the 2 never was and was still with a teacher or students profile on it. Did the power wash myself to clean it back to factory build. And thankfully these are not protected from someone performing a power wash without proper credentials. So I was able to clean out the data and profile from prior owner/user of the chromebook as guest when not knowing the password to the prior owner/user.
The ASUS Chromebooks I got while they do work and are heavily scratched up, they both appear to have been serviced to repair them as new keyboards and 1 of the 2 had the display serviced or replaced.
1 of the 2 had a damaged USB port, but no problems with that because at $27 each I'm just glad that they both work. Only 1 USB port needed anyways for option of mouse or accessing data off a thumb drive.
Biggest warning with these is that while they are cheap and guaranteed to work by the seller, they appear to be decommissioned covid learn from home era educational chromebooks and no further updates will be available to them, the ones that I got a matching pair of with hundreds available from the seller, were manufactured in 2017 and appear to be end of life for patch/update support for the Chrome OS. Not a critical issue for me but someone else might fall into the trap of buying a used Chromebook cheap and then not realize that it has a final patch for Chrome OS and no further patches will be made available.
The one thing impressive with them though is that their batteries are both very healthy being able to run the chromebook for 4 hours and then only 1/3 of battery life consumed with 2/3 left potentially 8 hours of use left in it before the battery runs dead.
My initial plan was going to be to disable the write protect and kick Chrome OS off of them as they are 11.6 inch display Chromebooks with Celeron CPU, 4GB RAM, and 16GB eMMC internal storage, but since messing around with them I've decided to run them as is and wait off on the kicking out of chrome until necessary
