[ale] Is there anybody we don't hate too much for Refurbs?

[DJ-Pfulio]

I've had good luck with eBay purchases of off-lease laptops. The last
one came with a 90 day warranty and was about 50% off the price of a new
system.  The seller had tens of thousands of excellent reviews.  The
purchase was exactly as expected.  8th generation Core i5 for $305,
including factory ready Win10 install.

I never saw the Win10 - pulled the HDD and put in an SSD, then last
month repurposed that HDD for an emergency need before another HDD
failed.  I think the Win10 license is stored in the BIOS somewhere, but
I don't know anything about Win10 today.

I might be having the same Intuit problem as you, but not with TurboTax.
We dumped them decades ago over DRM and have been happily using a
different tool.

On 10/24/19 12:30 PM, Neal Rhodes via Ale wrote:
> Slightly off-topic, but not too much.
> 
> My wife and partner informs me that TurboTax will no longer run on her
> Win7 desktop.   Without TurboTax, life ends as we know it.
> 
> We have used off-lease refurbs for most of our company's life.  If it's
> a server, I get a refurb and replace the disk with a new mirrored pair.
> (and load linux)   If it's a desktop, I feel lucky.
> 
> Thus far we've been fortunate at getting them from Tiger Direct.  Alas,
> no longer.   Got one on Amazon a few years back and that has been fine
> for Android development.
> 
> So, I trying to find average form factor 8GB, 1TB disk, Win 10 Pro, VGA
> & HDMI.    When I look at Amazon, there are plenty of choices.  Many of
> which have 15-25% one-star ratings. And you read them, it's a horror
> show - "arrived with broken power supply",  "NIC intermittent",  "Vendor
> non-communicative".
> 
> Yes, Amazon is horrible at policing their suppliers.    I'm
> wondering.... are companies being more selective at only letting go of
> their desktops when they know they are going south?   Are refurb vendors
> getting worse?
> 
> Is there anybody we like for refurbs these days?
> 
> I see the last one I bought was from Amazon Renewed, which says it has a
> 90 day Amazon guarantee.  I just checked at it has a 19% one star
> review.   I guess I was just lucky.
> 
> Regards,