Buying A New PC : Refurbish or Not Refurbish, That is the question.

Well, I was thinking of buying a new pc. Its gunna be a dell. I'm a premium member of del and yata yata blablabla. Well anyway i went to dell outlit, and i noticed that the priced decreaced dramatically. For ex I saw a Dell Dimension 1100/B110. The originnal price is around 900$. the refebished one is 500$. Now i cant complain about that.


So can anyone make a short list of Pros and Cons about Refurbished items and past experinces with Refurbished items. For Ex:

Pros:
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Cons:
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Thanks In Advance ^.^

lookcarefully at the fine print and check out the warranty for nastey little surprises.

if the warranty is identical to a new same model pc than you are probably ok.

just my opinion

dell kinda suck imo..i own 2 so i know

if it was me i'd buy a cheaper brand new 1

Post the specs of what you're getting for 500$. Make sure it's upgradeable, and not some integrated graphics with no AGP or PCI-Express slots.

Pros: lower price

Cons: Why did the original owner return it? Can you be sure you won't have the same problems?

The only time I bought a computer that was refurbished was a really long time ago. It was a 486DX2/66, upon installation I discovered it came with a free CMOS virus. I was like, "Yay... wait, what?" then got my money back and bought parts to build my own later. It was going for 150 dollars at the time, so I thought it would be an ok deal.

I would stay away from refurbished things, even though I'm sure some are good deals. There's usually a "snake in the grass" waiting to pop out, so be wary.

Pros
cheap!

Cons
May have problems.
It's been used.
May not have all of the original components

Some refurbished items, like CPUs, are usually good, but other items like video cards it's really best to buy new. Check your [r]etailer for warranty info.

Pros
Affordable

Cons
It's a Dell

I'd rather just wait and save up a few extra bucks for something brand new, rather than something that could have already been used and may have potential problems. Thats just my 2 cents.

IMO build your own, a s939 Sempron system can be built for a very low price. I don't care what any of you say about Semprons sucking, if you say that you are a moron, an overclocked Sempron is within 5% of a similarly clocked s939 A64.

Well, the computer that i MIGHT get is this.

XPS 400
(System Identifier: DDBA4CVY)

* XPS 400 Mini-Tower: Pentium D Processor 820 with Dual Core Technology (2.80GHz, 800FSB)
* Genuine Windows XP Media Center 2005

System Price : $679.00

Operating System
Genuine Windows XP Media Center 2005Memory
1 GB DDR2 NON-ECC SDRAM 533MHz (2 DIMMs)Hard Disk Drive
250 GB EIDE Hard Drive (7200RPM)Video
256MB nVidia Geforce 7300LE TurboCacheModem
56K DataFax ModemCertified Refurbished
Certified RefurbishedBase
XPS 400 Mini-Tower: Pentium D Processor 820 with Dual Core Technology (2.80GHz, 800FSB)Media Bay
16X DVD ROM Drive
16x DVD +/- RW w/dbl layer write capability
Software
Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Reader
Paint Shop Pro Standard
Sonic Cineplayer
Trend Micro PC-cillin with AntiVirus and Spyware removal 36-months
Netscape ISP Software
Music Match 10.1 Software
ISP Search Assist
ONLINE TRAINING
Image Restore Software
Wild Tangent Gaming Client
Net Zero ISP
ISP Software
Support Software
AOL ISP Software
AOL 8.0 ISP Software
Photo Album 6.0 Starter
No Productivity Suite - Corel WordPerfect word processor only
AOL ISP Software
Dell Direct Download
DVD Software
AOL 9.0 ISP Software
Windows Media Player
AOL 9.0 ISP SoftwareMisc
1394 Controller Card
Optical 2-Button Mouse
No Floppy Drive
Label
Dell Enhanced Multimedia USB Keyboard
IEEE 1394A ADAPTER,DIM9150
AOL Software Documentation
No Raid
Documentation
Shipping Material

~~~~

Copy and paste FTW

679 is too high for that, unless that was the original price and the refurb price is significantly lower. By the time you format the hard drive to get rid of all that goddamn bloatware, all you're really paying for is the hardware and the OS, and that's not 700$ worth of either.

I would never buy refurbished with their hard drives! I would buy the gear but also buy a new hard drive, simple reason, you do not know what the last owner was doing with that machine!

Recent court case near me, man is sentanced for having 800 catergory 4 images of children on his machine! He claims he did not know of them and I do beleive him as he is a brother of one of our friends. The original computer came from a computer centre used by ex offenders.

All the images were found in unallocated space using hard disk image recovery techniques by the police.

I am always cautious in that sort of purchase. I will not sell one of my old machines without replacing the hard disk first. Has my HD has my accounting info for my business on it.

How many copies of AOL software do you need? My answer is none, don't use their software even if you use them as your ISP!

Problems with many manufacturers is that they use ghost set ups for their computer restore! Which in itself is not a bad thing but it restores to all the extra crap you will never use as well. They really should allow you to just restore the operating system!

Dell seem reasonable until you need to buy anything else to go inside their box. Most of the time you have to go back to dell to buy the add ons and they charge you big time.

I built my own at slightly more than what I could have bought off the shelf for similar computers. But I now have a machine that I know inside out, I know exactly what parts I have used and that they work well together. I have future proofed it as much as anyone can, I use IDE and SATA drives.

The only thing I'm currently looking into is going liquid cooled.