Ask Lemmy

Restoring old business laptops will usually get you a better laptop than buying a budget new one that costs the same.

Retired business machines are also fantastic for “server in a bedroom closet” types of setups. When IT retires an entire department’s desktops, they’re forced to list them for sale, because the bean counters want to see that they got something back from them. IT doesn’t care how much they sell for, and are just listing them to get them out of the way. And since they’re listing like 50 of them at a time, the listings end up competing with each other to lower the price. No gamer is selling their two year old battle station unless they need the money, which means they’ll be looking to get top dollar for it… But the bored Help Desk 1 worker got assigned the task of selling them because nobody else wanted to do it, sees it as busywork, and knows they won’t personally see a single cent of the resale price. So they don’t care what the final price is.

The machines are usually very lightly used. Typically only used for running MS Office, answering emails, and browsing Facebook. This can be true even for the top-of-the-line laptops… Because the CEO will throw a fit if he notices his laptop is older or cheaper than the graphic artists’ laptops are… Even though the graphic artists need a dedicated GPU and lots of RAM for their CAD, video editing, etc… While the CEO only uses it to answer like three emails a week. So the C-suite tends to get upgrades to the newest model every year, even though they don’t need it. And last year’s model gets listed for sale.