Buying a refurbished desktop

[grampahol]

It's been years since my last desktop. I've been messing with my pretty decent G6 phone for the past several years, but I'm thinking about a Dell optiplex 9010 business machine (from about 2012 or thereabouts) since my budget is probably well under $200. I want nothing to do with any home computer anymore with its extensive bloatware.
I've been looking at several and for around $120 or thereabouts I can get one (SFF desktop) with around a 250GB hdd, 4 GB ram, i5 processor.. For that price I can easily upgrade ram and even go with a SSD drive a little later on down the road.. 
The old junk I'm currently fiddling with is an old Compaq, 500 GB hdd, 2 G ram with a tin can and string processor.. I could yank out the HDD and the dvd drive from it then only worry about the ram upgrade.. Right now it's running only Fedora 19 and it's about as slow as it can get.. 

Anyways.. just thinking about it. I don't want anything that's ever been in someone's home and really don't care for windows unless it's the business version. The one I'm considering has Win10 pro version, but I'll very likely run a dual boot with Debian Linux and leave the windows to the old woman since she's unfamiliar with linux.. 

Any solid refurbishers anyone is familiar with? 

[WiregrassBenGal]

Hello,

With this reply I don't know of any specific refurbishers, but I have had good luck recently with eBay. For $44.00 plus shipping this company in Syracuse sent me a whitebox computer from the Vista era that had been used in a university setting. They cleaned it out a little and then installed dual-boot Ubuntu and Windows 7. For another $20.00 including shipping I found an NVIDIA graphics card that would work in it plus a link to an up-to-date driver. With that upgrade plus the 8GB RAM it already had it zips through everything I need to do plus runs Second Life very well. At least until I get forced over to Windows 10 by default this computer should do well for me along with another that runs Windows 8.1 and this laptop which runs lubuntu LXLE.

Linux/Ubuntu is my choice for surfing since there is so much less exposure to red screen malware or any type of viruses. Plus the SeaMonkey browser with Duck Duck Go search engine means I'm tracked way less.

Best of luck to you. Did you mention you were looking at a Dell? They've always worked well for me and my 8.1 machine is an Inspiron i3647 that continues to work well.

Jolene

[grampahol]

Sounds decent.. I'm still going with a retired business machine built for speed and without any homeowners fingerprints anywhere near it.. lol
I tried Ubuntu which is ok, but my preference is still Debian /BSD config.. 

[fredtoast]

I don't know anything about computers, but I bought my daughter a refurbished laptop off Ebay a year ago and it has worked perfectly so far.  Based on the power and memory I got it for less than half of what a new one would have cost.  It did not look "brand new" but it was very clean and did not appear to be used very much at all.

[*bfine32*]

Perhaps a Chromebook is the answer for you.

[*Wyche'sWarrior*]

I've never purchased a refurbished computer, but I've had great luck with refurbished home audio.

[grampahol]

Yey...got it today, HP 8300 elite..SSD.. Runs faster than anything I've ever touched.. Everything pops up instantly and this is with just 4gb ram, but the solid state hard drive... wooooooo!  Probably the best $169 I ever spent for a computer..  My first computer cost over $2000 with 2 gb drive and ram in the MGs.. That was back when my kids were still kids..younger than my grandkids are today lol

[*bfine32*]

(01-07-2019, 07:31 PM)grampahol Wrote: Yey...got it today, HP 8300 elite..SSD.. Runs faster than anything I've ever touched.. Everything pops up instantly and this is with just 4gb ram, but the solid state hard drive... wooooooo!  Probably the best $169 I ever spent for a computer..  My first computer cost over $2000 with 2 gb drive and ram in the MGs.. That was back when my kids were still kids..younger than my grandkids are today lol

When I got from Afghanistan in 2005 I treated myself to one of those new fangeled plasma TVs. Got a steal on a 26" for just over $1900 

[grampahol]

(01-07-2019, 10:10 PM)bfine32 Wrote: When I got from Afghanistan in 2005 I treated myself to one of those new fangeled plasma TVs. Got a steal on a 26" for just over $1900 

I remember many years ago asking my dad if they could make TVs flat so they could be hung on a wall like a picture and he said it'll never happen because they can't flatten out those big glass picture tubes..  That was way before anyone had ever heard of LCD's or plasma screens..  That was also back when my brain was still somewhat flexible and I could still imagine things that didn't exist. 

Anyway, it's nice to not have to wait a half hour to post something waiting for the hard drive to catch up with memory or however that stuff works.