Buy Broken Stuff....Really!!!

If you don't already do this, your missing something. What am I talking about on this gorgeous Saturday morning (the first cool one this "fall")? It's no secret that I flip computers, so it shouldn't be a surprise that I often leverage the "scratch and dent" bin of eBay and Craigslist for items that I can pick up cheaper than "normal". There are several dynamics to this particular strategy, so lets look at them.

At it's most basic is the "bread and butter" of my little business; the refurbished Corporate laptop. I don't need to get into the benefits of them today, but here's how to squeeze a little more out of them than is already there. If I go out on eBay and just buy a ready to go E6400, I should be able to pick it up for somewhere between $175 and $200, then if I sell it for the typical $225-235, I will have cleared my standard of about $50 (give or take). However, many of these things are sold "part or repair". That means they are missing something. That could be everything "something", but most likely is that they are missing a hard drive, or maybe the A/C adapter too. Sometimes, there's as much as a $100 difference between a "ready to go" machine and one like that. Another factor is this: if I have an appropriate hard drive, in this case a 2.5" SATA HDD of between 80-160Gb/5400rpm, then I'm already ahead of the game. I emphasizes "have" because, if I have to go buy one, it ends up costing around $40 after shipping and it's just not worth it. So where do these drives come from? When I work on a computer and it's trashed, or the client needs/wants an upgrade, then I save the drive. If they want, I'll destroy it, but that's rarely the case. Also, when I get a computer for my family, I always pull the mechanical hard drive and replace it with an SSD. So, over time, I accumulate a number of good condition drives up here in my cabinet just waiting for a job. You might wonder if this is safe and/or ethical. Here's the deal; if after I've DBAN'd it, and "clean-loaded" an OS on one of these guys, the probability that someone is going to try and extract old data off of it is pretty darned slim! So, if I'm careful in buying the "new" machine and pick one of those "Parts or Repair" jobbies that still have the caddy and cover, then I'm golden! For Pete sakes though, don't buy one without the caddy/cover, or you'll end up spending upwards of $25 just ordering that little piece of metal and plastic! 

The same thing goes for the T61, T400/500 machines from Lenovo ThinkPad. These are corporate machines and when they come "off lease" or are surplus'd due to replacement, many entities require the company handling the old machines to physically destroy the drives. Anybody like banks, insurance companies and hospitals which require client record confidentiality will then put thousands of these computers into the secondary market w/o a drive! The better surplusers, will save the caddy/HDD cover, but the sloppy ones will just destroy the whole thing. This whole process will allow you to either make more money or if you are buying for yourself, save more money. I've often upgraded our own computers using this technique and end up making it a zero-sum operation.

Here's the next Frugal Propellerhead trick: buy outright broken stuff.... really! Understand before we proceed that there are risks with this. It's simply not 100% and sometimes you lose. However, knowing this, if the price is such that you are OK with the cost/benefit ratio of the equation, then there are great gains to be had. I'll start with my latest conquest. The Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD4H bought off of Craigslist for $65. I understood that it had a broken PCI-e (x8) slot, and was pretty OK with the knowledge that it was usable even without that slot. At worse I could use it in my HTPC which would never need a second graphics card. Besides, this was an ATX board with a third full-length slot (albeit a x4). However, the upside was that this is a board which is at worse, a year old, and at best 6-months or less since the Z77 platform was current right up until the release of the Z87 "Haswell" chipset. And as you guys know from an earlier post, I did a RMA (which was approved) on this guy and it's on it's way to Gigabyte. So in a week or so, I'll have a replacement in hand. 

That little episode was so successful, I've decided to do it again. This time, with a Gigabyte GV-R7750OC graphic card. I've been wanting to upgrade my vid-card for some time, not because I need more power (I don't), but because, my HD 6700, on a fairly regular basis, will behave strangely. It will give me artifacts around my mouse cursor, and if I don't reboot quickly, it'll go "black screen" and lock up the box. This is not acceptable on my main workstation on which depend pretty heavily. So, why don't I just pick up one of the many really cheap, 5000 or even 4000 series cards and replace it then? Well, for one thing; I'm kind of a stubborn cus' and don't like using "bottom-feeder" gear on my primary machine. And secondly, I will on occasion, convert a video or two, but most importantly do photo-editing on rather large DSLR generated image files. There's that, plus I want a cool running card as well. Those specialty passively cooled "mid-line" cards are really kind of hard to find and they tend to be a little pricey (at least to me) when you do find one. What to do? While researching cards for my client's gaming computer, I had zero'd in on AMD's 7xxx mid-line otherwise know as the "Southern Islands" series. In there is a low-powered model designated as the 7750. So low-powered that it doesn't need external power. Now; that's for me! However, I didn't want to pay the $90-100 for a new one. Yeah, that's right......I want nice higher end products, but don't want to pay the price. Did I say that I'm a stubborn 'cus.....hence Frugal Propellerhead? Not surprised that I bought a "parts or repair", "untested" (meaning, "we know it doesn't work, but you can hope") one off of eBay for $45, are ya? Would you be surprised to learn that Gigabyte also warranty's these guys for 3 Years like their motherboards? And that, I've got run it through their RMA process and currently waiting for approval to send it back?

One more example. In case you forgot: a little more than a year ago, I bought an "as is" ThinkPad Tablet (original Android version) for a very good price. The same day that I received it, I shipped it to Lenovo as a warranty repair since (of course) it was still within a year of purchase. They didn't have the parts to fix it within the specified time-frame for a "corporate" item, so it was arranged that they would drop-ship a NEW one directly to my house. Yup, that's how it's done! 

Any failures? Yup; I bought a couple of refurbished Dell Stream 7 tablets from Newegg. Unfortunately, the power connector broke on my son's pretty quickly and within what Newegg had assured me to be Dell's warranty period. That turned out not to be the case and after several unproductive discussions with their consumer support facility in India, it went nowhere. Newegg however, was gratious enough to do a partial refund and we moved on from that episode. What's the lesson? I could very well turn the name of this whole blog into: DON'T BUY CONSUMER!!!