Has your experience with Refurbs changed over time?

[ChristineBCW]

Has your experience with Refurb'd ____ (any electronics) ____ changed over time?

If you used a lot of some time, did you get a bad batch and no longer purchase those (that type of item) or maybe stopped buying Refurbs at all?

I've never had qualms about buying refurb computers but I tend to test those heavily in the first week to check power supplies and monitors (notebooks, especially. Desktops only present problems to me when difficult-to-replace power-supplies are used).

Refurb printers were shaky propositions until I discovered a genius repair guy down in San Antonio, Texas. Now, I'll buy refurb's left and right, and when they aren't perfect, he'll make them so.

What about routers and adapters? (I'm not sure how an adapter is "refurb'd" - did some solder connection fail? Dropped into a vat of crunchy peanut butter? Used as saltwater bait?)

I have a feeling a Refurb'd Adapter is merely a repackaged unit that someone couldn't get to work to their satisfaction - and perhaps had nothing to do with the unit itself.

Any refurb trends you have seen? Good, bad or changed?

 

[thiggins]

I buy refurbs all the time and haven't been burned yet. But my rule is to buy from a manufacturer's refurb store when possible and only from a source that allows returns. My other go to is Amazon Warehouse deals. I never buy from individuals.

All my Dell desktops are from the Dell Refurb store.
I've bought numerous refurb iPad2s from Apple.
LCD TVs and tablets from Amazon Warehouse. I just picked up a "refurb" Galaxy Tab S 10.5 for the price of a new 8.4.

And, I don't need to buy routers or adapters...

 

[AdvHomeServer]

Agree that refurbs are a great value.

Windows 8 was the best thing that ever happened to the laptop refurb market. I suspect a lot of good pcs were returned when people got their first taste of the horrible Win 8 interface. I put Classic Shell on mine and I see only a fraction of a percent of the Win 8 interface. The rest of the OS is solid. Each refurb purchase saved me a large amount.

My tablet is a refurb. My DLNA DVD is a refurb. Two of my routers are refurbs. All work great and provided big savings. The routers were both mfgr refurbs.

The only thing I would be afraid to buy as a refurb is a TV. In my mind, only a broken TV would be returned. I would probably also skip a refurb disk drive.

I buy printers based on the cost of ink from 3rd parties. Brother seems to always have great deals there. I consider them disposable and go with the cheapest that meets my needs.There's always a sale somewhere.

 

[fistv]

At work, 98% is all new, no refurb, under warranty or maintenance contract.
I've bought some refurb stuff, mostly HP small form factor desktops for back in the warehouse where they run label printers. Bought a few HP proliant G6's from suppliers on Ebay or server supply coming back in off leases and put them under HP care packs, the last two were for my avaya phone system. At work the printers get replaced when they die with new.
As for printers and stuff at home, I usually replace my color laser once the original toner runs out, 3 years, I don't print much now that the kids are out of college, the new toners usually cost more than a new printer. As for inkjets, they usually start making those nasty grinding noises after 3 years so off to recycling they go. Next laser will be b/w w/duplexing, I'll leave the color to the hp multifunction inkjet. As for routers, my last one lasted over 10 years, my smc 7008abr. I could fix it but it only has a 10mb wan port and next week sometime we will be upping our cable modem to 15mb from the 5mb it's at now, only $8 more per month so I will stick with my wrt1900ac.

 

[fistv]

I buy printers based on the cost of ink from 3rd parties. Brother seems to always have great deals there. I consider them disposable and go with the cheapest that meets my needs.There's always a sale somewhere.

Agree on the brothers, picked up a color laser, 4040cdn from them on sale at Office max, $249, with duplexing. Just starting to run out of toner after 4 years, the toner would cost me over $400 though I might buy a pack of the starters like it came with, 4 years ago.

 

[ChristineBCW]

Windows 8 was the best thing that ever happened...

(snicker) Yes, completely agree, and particularly with the assumption that "fed up!" was a good reason.

Has anyone ever tinkered with a non-functioning USB stick? I could imagine breakage would be a problem. Maybe faulty solders out of a batch, but since those are all assembled overseas, no one would ship them back there, re-solder them and return them as 'refurbs'. That'd have to be a contract job - maybe some City College collects them, has students learn "all about computer assembly" and solders and QC's them. Then sells them for revenue.

Has anyone ever heard of THIS occurring?

Otherwise, "refurb adapter" is probably "repackaged" and "re-heat-shrink'd", I'd think.

Our refurb printers used to be Mfr-Only but after locating our Mister Wizard, we don't pay much attention - we snag up as many of one particular kind of printer and tuck those away because their useful production can go on and on...

 

[stevech]

I don't buy refurbs with rare exception. Anything mechanical like hard disk drives, no. Anything with a cycle lifetime, like SSDs, flash drives, no. Power supply: no.

 

[Trip]

Gotta go with steve regarding cyclic lifespan products.

In general, I almost always go new for my business purchases and those made on behalf of clients. One exception being off-lease computers systems -- business-class HP and Lenovo desktops -- into which I sub in new drives, RAM, etc.

Overall, I see no harm in refurbed gear for personal or non-critical use cases, so long as one is careful in choosing the vendor and performing their due diligence on the product. For example, I bought a reburbed Asus RT-N12 A1 (mistake #1) from NewEgg (mistake #2) a few years ago. Had I done my research properly, I would have known that this hardware revision was a general no-no, and that NewEgg's return policy for that unit was practically non-existent. End result? $25 paperweight and lesson learned.

 

[ChristineBCW]

We have a local mass-Dell reseller near us, and we've had great success but mostly that's the vendor-wants-to-please-us issue. I'm never too certain they offer the same calibre of benefits to individuals, despite advertising (or is that "because of it"?)

We have two national distributors and they stopped offering us refurbs because we dropped from the 500- and 1000-unit purchases into the "dozens maybe". I like to keep those distrib's happy because they'll also tell us RMA counts on particular items, as if that's a valid insight into any product's quality as opposed to "number of poor uses by customers".