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

[Solomon Peachy]

On Fri, Oct 25, 2019 at 10:39:38AM -0400, DJ-Pfulio via Ale wrote:
> 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.

My current laptop was one of those off-lease eBay purchases.  Made in 
2014, purchased in late 2015, and aside from the SSD barfing a year or 
so ago, has held up quite well.

If you go that route, I'd recommend making sure you stick to tier-1 
players and their "business" models (eg Dell Latitude series), as 
they're usually more physically robust and have a longer support 
lifecycle.

> 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.

Since Win8, the license key is burned into the nvdata somewhere, so if 
one wishes to reinstall the OS they just need the generic windows 
installer media downloadable from MS.

 - Solomon
-- 
Solomon Peachy			       pizza at shaftnet dot org
High Springs, FL                          ^^ (email/xmpp) ^^
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
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