When It Rains.....It Pours!

I know that people tend to use this little phrase in a negative sense, but this is a case where the opposite is true. A few posts ago (In "Milk Run") I wrote about picking up an underpriced 2010 MacBook with the funds that I had accumulated from doing some misc. computer work. Of course I'm not in the process of a switch to Mac, but I'm more than happy to take advantage of the Mac-Lovers out there, by making money off of them! In this case, I ended up selling the cleaned-up (in a physical as well as computer sense of the word) for $500! Yup, I doubled my money (more or less) in 2 weeks. 

  At this point, things started coming together. First I came across a D50 that the seller seemed to think that there was something wrong with: he stated that it would occasionally "not focus" giving an R07 error. After a little bit of research, I found that this wasn't an error, but the camera telling the user that it's in the process writing the images from the buffer to the memory card and there are 7 images left to write! While this is happening, the camera won't do anything else, including trying to focus. I got it for $91 (shipping included), so the "back-up/hazardous duty" camera has been acquired. Pretty closely thereafter came the Tablet.....

 Several months ago, I got involved in examining the market for tablets at the prompting of a friend, of course, I had come across the ThinkPad offering at that time, but dismissed it because it was in the "nose-bleed" $650+ area that's clearly aimed at the business end of the market. However, it was essentially a ThinkPad version of what a tablet should be, with excellent IPS/Gorilla Glass hi-res screens (1280 x 800) and built-in Pen input capability. What one reviewer said sums it up suscintly: "What your IT department would design a tablet to be". A few days ago, there appeared on eBay the high-end (64Gb) version "As Is" for $200 with a "make offer" option. After a little back and forth with the seller, it was found that the tablet won't power on, but.......still under warrantee TILL NOVEMBER! Holy Cats! I offered him $150, which he took, so I'm chomping at the bit waiting for this thing to show up so I can send it in to Lenovo for repairs. 

Which leads in to a rarely discussed grey area. That of buying products known to be "not working", but still under warrantee. This can be a tremendous technique for saving and/or getting an otherwise overly expensive product. But it's not without problems. First of all, there is every possibility that you'll find that the item has been broken due to some user error that voids the warranty. Secondly, it often requires a LOT of research to ascertain whether it's even eligible for repairs under warranty anyway. In this case, I was able to find this out because I'm very familiar with ThinkPad support (which the seller was not). Then comes the really tricky part. In the process of messaging back and forth, you have to figure out whether the seller is being honest about his selling the product. Whether this was really something he just broke or in this case, part of a "mixed lot" of corporate "cast-offs" that he picked up. A quick look at his "other items" for sale indicated that it was the later reason. So, I decided that I'm willing to bear the risk of getting it repair under warranty (or not) for $150 which is what I offered and he accepted. Typically, these are not IT guys and want to just sell off as quickly as possible so they can do it all over again. 

 The last thing was the "Plastic Fantastic", or 28-80mm f3.3-5.6 "G" lens which I had previously written about as the perfect pairing with the light and compact D50. Virtually all the professional reviews I've seen of it rave about it's performance being all out of proportion with it's weight, size and cost. I had found that it can often be found under $50, but last night, I scored one for under $30, after shipping! This was probably because of the auction ending at the awkward time of just after midnight central time, regarless......I'm happy!

The upshot is that, all-in-all, for about $280, I was able to score three of the items on my "wanted" lists by spending just a little bit more than the profit I made from "flipping" the MacBook. Yup, this there is going to require more writing after I use them for a while, but I'm sure looking forward to that!

You Win Some....and You Lose Some

I really hate losing, but sometimes it happens and you have to give in and decide to stop throwing time away. I had a client who a few years ago bought an IBM ThinkPad R52 from me and he (mostly his family) have been rough on their machines. They have 4 of my machines and one HP desktop that I rebuilt for him in their house.....and they have to have the OS rebuilt on a regular basis. A week ago, he brought me the two ThinkPads, one of which had a simple WiFi settings issue that I resolved and sent right back, but the other "blue-screened" immediately on Windows start up. "No big deal", I thought; I can just pull the drive, connect it to one of my USB adapters and pull the files off. Then I'll put it back in and reload the OS from restore disks.....no fuss, no muss. 

That was the plan anyway. Several days, and twice as many different data recover utilities later, the drive steadfastly refused to mount....on any computer. So I put it in the (previously) fail-safe backup, which is to use a ThinkPad drive adapter that fits in their UltraBay. I don't know why that one always worked; maybe it give the drive a little more voltage, but that failed too! Down to the last straw, I put it in the freezer over night and gave that old technique a try. Still no joy. So, I'm going to write it off as a mystery since I don't hear anything physically wrong with it like rattling or even the dreaded clicking.

Now, on to the "Win Some" part. NO, that's not a bigger picture of the bad drive, it's a 500Gb Travelstar. I've always coveted these big drives, but never could pull the trigger on one given their price and my lack of real need for one. But the other day, I was having to go up to the Carrollton suburb of Dallas to pick up that $99 HP desktop for our friends as well as a copy of OS X "Snow Leopard" to restore the MacBook when I came across and ad for one of these for $40 on Craig's List. I texted the guy and promptly forgot about it. A few hours later he texted me back to say that he still had it, but someone was going to buy it, so I offered him $35 and asked him to call me if his buyer didn't materialize. I was in Irving which is the far side of Dallas. Anyway, while I was up in Carrollton running around picking stuff up, he calls to say that I can have the drive for $35 and that he'd meet me on my way home: BONUS! Sometimes you see things on CL that are great deals, but it's not worth the time and gas to go get it at the various far-flung parts of the Metro-plex. 

 On the way home, I swung in to Mesquite and picked up one of the many Dell Latitude D6x0 Series machines that I've sold. This was a computer that I recently had to completely rebuild and move to an new base, because the client dropped it while it was running! Well, I got it back to him the other day, but he called me back to say that after that first time at McDonald's, he could never get it to connect again via WiFi. So I got it home and did the usual things to it like going with a different connection manager (Dell vs. Windows), dumped and reload drivers, but still no go. I did notice that it was hanging on to a weird IP that it was using with the Ethernet. So I surmised that it was having an issue with TCP/IP. Sure enough, after a little bit of Googling, I came across a post of somebody talking about a corruption in the TCP/IP stack that was messing up Winsockets. I hadn't heard Winsockets since the Windows 3.11 days when you had to load and set that up yourself! So I had it do a rebuild (using DOS) and it magically fixed the problem. 

On a side note, the Snow Leopard disk I picked up was used to clear and reload the MacBook I bought in the pawn shop and is now listed on Craig's List for twice what I paid for it. I guess I should have really called this post, Win Some and Lose One. Still hate losing any though.....

"Milk Run" to "Pawn Star": Mac Style

Here's a quick little post that really illustrates how great computer deals can be found anywhere. Yesterday, I had just delivered a laptop rebuild for a client that had dropped (while on) his Dell D620 and cracked the base, killed the fan and hard drive. So it was largely a "labor" job. I had a replacement hard drive on hand, so I just had to buy a base and fan. 

So the upshot of it was that I had $115 burning a hole in my pocket and a task to buy milk........ "What the H*#@*#L!!!".....milk? We routinely go to Braum's for milk, which is not only cheaper, but don't feed their herd hormones to up production, plus the kids are in favor of the ice cream that they have there. But we don't have a Braum's, so it involves going to a neighboring town which has a pawn shop that I like nose around at (although I've never bought anything there). On the way out, I spotted a gleaming while Mac. I saw that it was marked at a surprising $250. So on a lark, I asked to see it, since even older iBooks (G4) typically sell between $350 and $450. Much to my surprise, it wasn't an iBook, but a MacBook! Now my knowledge of the various Mac models is pretty general and not anywhere near that of PCs, so I tried to call my Mac-loving/Mac-user brother-in-law, but he didn't answer. I knew enough to suspect that it was pretty new and look up the "About the Mac" utility and did the "oh-so-modern" thing of snapping a picture with my phone. Later after I left when my brother-in-law called me back, he told me that the serial number should be in the pic that I took and if I plugged it into the right place on the Apple support site, it would tell me what that machine was. 

It turned out to be a 2 year old, "Late 2010" MacBook! Although the "plain-Jane" version, the typical worth seems to be currently somewhere between $750 and $900! You want to bet that I scrounged up every nickel I had and ran right back there and bought it!?! I'll probably have to spend $30 and buy disks to do a complete reload, but GOOD GRIEF! I should be able to easily double my investment on this thing!

I feel like I've just been in an episode of "PAWN STARS"; the East Texas spin-off that is!!!

Desktops Are Worthless.....

That should be expected of someone who has a family of 4 working on 5 ThinkPads, doesn't it? Actually, what I should say that desktops are "worth......LESS", and not worthless. Maybe it reflects my old guys computer experience from way-back of working on them in the IBM PC-AT/XT days, but we have 3 (not counting servers) desktop computers in the house and it's about to become 4! OK, 1 and some time soon it'll be 2 are actually HTPCs, but of course they are really desktops that just don't sit on or under a desk. 

So, what do I mean; desktops are worth less then? For those who don't haunt Craig's List or looking at the desktop listings on eBay OR have been given any number of old machines by people because they heard that you are a "computer guy", then you might not be aware. Aware of what? Aware that the market for desktop computers and computer parts is ridiculously low or non-existent! 

Which gets me to why a guy like me would also have a desktop workstation. Other than the fact that the parts are so amazingly cheap for the kind of power you get, there are just some things that notebook computers don't do very well. One is the ever-present issue of file storage. Yes, I do in fact have a 4Tb+ home server for that, but I'm not talking about archival storage, I'm talking about temporary storage that is essential when you do a lot with media like photo, video and music. The fact is, that mechanical storage for notebooks runs twice what it is for desktop. The other issue is, you can't just throw a bunch of drives in a case, so you end up with USB 2.0 which is waaay sloooowww! My other issue goes back to working with media as well. It's all fine and good to web-surf or do anything text-based with a 15" or even 17", but to do anything effective, you really need at least a 20" monitor and in my case, one 22" WUXGA (1920 x 1200), one 20" UXGA (1600 x 1200), plus another WXGA+ (1440 x 900) display when I need it. Try that with a notebook computer of any kind! 

But it's not my desktop that got me going for this post, but some friends of ours who came home from a camping trip last week to find that they'd experienced a surge which killed half the outlets of their "surge protector", along with everything plugged into them. So, after looking at their situation, it was obvious that replacing the fried power supply of their 10 year old (socket 423, P4) Gateway wouldn't have been very efficient use of money. I told them that my guess would be that they could replace it with a MUCH newer MUCH faster machine for about $100-120. And my standing rule of thumb on electronics is to replace anything where the costs will be close to half of replacement. So as part of this conversation, I started doing research on the usual suspects of eBay and Craig's List. Thirty minutes later, I had confirmed my suspicion that with $100-150 in hand and some patience, anyone could get into a relatively powerful and a MUCH more up-to-date desktop computer. 

Specifically, if you want a fairly powerful socket 775 or AM3 dual core computer capable of running Windows 7 well, you can go one of two routes. There's the preferable (at least to me) route of finding a "generic" computer with nice components, but people who build these things tend not only to know what they are doing, but the worth of what they have, so these machines usually to sell for around $250. And although, they are typically worth every penny (and more), but it's not the price-point that our friends would be comfortable with at the moment. The second route would be the "name-brand manufacturer" build (such as HP, Dell, etc.). The fact of the matter is that because they sell so many that they surplus in the thousands at a time from large entities like, school, corporations, and the government. This drives the price down to half of what the specs would otherwise indicate. A good example would be an HP DC7700 workstation class machine equipped with a socket 775 MB, Intel E6300 Core 2 Duo CPU, 2Gb of RAM, 160Gb hard drive......all for $99! Really! I can take a another $100 and really heat this thing up, but it'll do fine as a family computer just as it sits. 

 

The important thing here is the Core 2 Duo fitted to the Intel socket 775. That particular socket started back in the "Prescott" P4 days. We want the later versions with a chipset AFTER the 8xx era (in general) so that it'll not only physically accept, but RUN the latest Core 2 Duo CPUs. If you are a regular "family" type user, there's nothing that you'll do that the newer C2D processors can't. AND this socket will even take the quad core ones as well. Just give it plenty of RAM! 

Now, another thing to watch out for. Take a close look at the image of the run-of-the-mill HP/Compaq business computer above. No....I did not flip the image. Remember when I said that I'd rather purchase a "generic" built computer? The reason is that the large manufacturers for whatever reason like to use parts customized to their specifications for their production purposes, such as  a weird power button header, odd drive mounts, unusual power supplies and worse of all, a non-standard MB layout. Many Dell, Gateway, Lenovo, and HP desktops use a board layout called BTX (which is backward versus ATX which is standard), so if you ever want to replace it with a newer board...you're out of luck! So, look for one with a normal layout such as some Dell Vostros and HP DCs. The other is if you are lucky enough to live near a metropolitan area or have a friend who does, then run a search on eBay for that area. Why? Desktops are heavy and it's expensive to ship them. PLUS make certain that you find a dealer that is OK with a  "local pickup" (message them and check), some of them jack up their shipping and handling (S&H) price to make more profit and don't allow pickups. That $100 whiz-bang desktop doesn't look like such a good deal with $40+ of S&H tacked on to it! 

In the end, I'll probably get them that HP which is located in a nearby suburb being sold by a dealer that's already told me he's OK with a "local pickup". That E6300 is a Core 2 Duo processor running at !.86ghz built on the 45nm process making it a pretty cool running CPU. A 160Gb drive is plenty for them, and since this machine is new enough to have SATA ports, throwing in bigger drives later will be easy. I checked and the MB has the PCIe slot necessary for them to put on higher powered video cards down the road as well. 

What a great (and cheap) way to go....as long as you aren't a gamer that is!

Buy the Best

For someone who spends very little (relatively speaking) on his technology, this sounds kind of crazy doesn't it? Here's the issue: when you buy used (most of the time), you can't afford to buy "cheap". There's a huge difference between "inexpensive" and "cheap". It's my philosophy that one of the major problems with modern American society is the "Walmart-ization" of the consumer model, which is not to say that there's anything wrong with shopping at Walmart per se, but that we've come to "buy into" buying cheap and new. This unfortunately leads us into buying "more" (since it breaks and can't be fix economically) vs. better quality. Of course, we aren't the only nation in the world guilty of this as Target (Dayton-Hudson/French) and Ikea (Swedish) are more than willing to participate in this business model as well!

......but enough with the soap-box! Today, I'm here to talk about buying quality at a great price. As most folks are well aware, if you really want to take it to an extreme, you can always buy a Mercedes and keep it for 20-25 years and 500,000 miles plus. However, this blog is about about the typical consumer electronics and office type products we use daily and buy regularly so I'll concentrate on those and discuss why I buy what I do.

What started this started this whole thought process was, of all things, some bad RAM! Of course, buying this sort of thing on eBay is a risky proposition to start with, but there are benefits to this type of risk-taking. One of the areas that I don't compromise is the RAM that I use in my personal machines. I tend to use Mushkin as much as I can. Mushkin is a small outfit out of the Denver area that originally made their name by making upgrade memory for Macs. Their high-end (it's all high-end, just a matter of degrees) stuff is considered ultra-reliable and stable. I've been using it for a number of years now and have never been disappointed. However, it tends to be pricey, even used. So I bought some a month or so ago to upgrade my desktop to 8Gb and for my XP box build-up. Both sets came in with problems! I contacted them and after some tech support to try a couple of things it was determined that what I already knew....they were bad. So I was given the RMA and shipped them off to their Pfugerville, Texas support facility. Less than a week later, I got back a replacement (4Gb) pair for the "Blackline" RAM, but since the "Silverline" (1Gb) pair has been long-since out of production, they sent me 2 (4Gb) pairs of their current model for that spec! That's 8Gb vs. the 2Gb that I sent them! I'm currently running 12 sticks of their RAM and 2 SSDs in my machines. You think they might very well have kept this customer for a while longer!?!

While on the subject of Macs (at least peripherally), I've always had people ask me why I don't use them. And the fact of the matter is that they are outstanding products (other than that accursed touchpad of course)! Everything they produce from computers, to iPods, to the iPad have excellent design, outstanding engineering and generally top-notch build quality. So, what's the issue? The fact is that they just don't sell enough of them to drive the the price to a level I'm willing to pay on the used market and given their fanatically fan-boy following, that keeps the price up even higher. However, some of their products are some dominant that they've become common in the used market and make great deals. We have a whole fleet of iPods of various types around the house and use them regularly. The "Classic" is such a great product for the price it's hard not buy them and use them for both music as well as portable storage. 

We'll start with the ThinkPads that we use in our house. Back when I started working in IT about 15 years ago, it was not a given that virtually all products would work relatively well, right out of the box. Those were the days when a basic desktop PC would run you $2000-2500 and laptops routinely cost $3000-3500+. Furthermore, if you made the mistake of buying a Packard-Bell, CTX or Acer, chances were good that it didn't work well and were very difficult if not impossible to update. Then as now, I wanted to have both a desktop and a laptop computer and certainly couldn't go out and just buy both. With the help of my brother, I built a clone 486 cpu based desktop and bought a used laptop. In those days, very few people owned laptops and they tended to be a little difficult to work with. Of course, I further exacerbated the issue, by getting an "ultra-portable" which commonly for that time, had very few features built in. I had fallen in love with the amazing design and engineering of the IBM ThinkPad 701c "Butterfly". They were already old and kind of obsolete at the time, but the one I found was still under warranty. So for the next year IBM ThinkPad product support patiently worked with me on everything from driver installation of various peripherals to reloading of operating systems and communications set up. In the process, I learned to work on computers and created a future career for myself in IT. Over the years, I learned that there was a huge difference not only in how companies built their products, but also supported them as well. As an example, I found the not only was IBM willing to work with me for hours on end to resolve a problem, they'd even do it when it involved connecting to someone else' product (like my Panasonic CD-ROM drive). Let's just say that not all companies behave this way. I could of course go on about this for hours, but lets get down to other specifics.

In my home theater, I have a number of products made by Onkyo. Many are branded Integra which is their premium line (like Lexus vs. Toyota), but made by Onkyo nevertheless. I once sold their products in a former life and found that they embodied what I would call a great "bang for the buck" product. They sold slightly above the Best Buy range, but rarely if ever failed and offered performance far superior to their modest (typically $500-1500) price-point. 
They are far less "known" by the general public than the more popular Japanese competitors such as Sony, Pioneer and Yamaha, but offer a more neutral sound and better cost-build quality ratio. My plan is to eventually move up to the level of good separate made my Rotel, but that's essentially the same story with a British accent. And of course it is a brand that isn't well-known by the general public either.

The line that makes up the core of my other main hobby (photography via digital SLRs) is the exact opposite. There is probably no other company that has the brand recognition in photography quite like Nikon. Yes, I'm aware that there's higher pedigree (among cogniscenti) like Leica or Zeiss, but I'm discussing the general population here and certainly not "nose-bleed" prices either! My main draw to Nikon isn't so much the brand as it is the consistent commitment to quality and non-obsolescence. To one degree or another, the same could be said of Canon, Pentax or even Sony (Konica-Minolta), but I'm happy with my choice. There are simply an unbelievable number of lenses out there that will fit the mount going back to the 1960s.  And because they've been an industry leader for so long, there's a wide variety of models that have been produced and now occupy price-points ranging from $150-200 all the way up into the thousands on the used market. And of course the other half of the equation is that their quality is such that purchasing a used Nikon DSLR isn't a risky proposition. The buyer can generally expect it to last somewhere around 100,000 shutter actuations or more. The typical buyer of these cameras new, usually put on less than a quarter of that number before they upgrade. Great for frugal buyers everywhere!

My last example today was the subject of the last post; my new office chair...the Aeron by Herman Miller. Here's what happened to lead to this acquisition. I was actually VERY happy with a chair that was left to me by a previous co-worker when he left. It was a simple, but decent chair with nylon mesh upholstery vs. the more typical cloth. I tend to get hot sitting and wanted something that would breath, so I was pretty excited to have it! However, as it aged, the foam started to wear out and lose the support it used to have. Plus, one of the things common to inexpensive office chairs is the they tend to just simple bolt to the base, meaning that there is something like 1/4" or so of the actual bolts that extends into the seat. That's all fine of good when the chair/foam was new, but cheap padding tends to loose it's support quickly and now I easily feel the ends of those bolt poking me in the nether regions any time I'm in it for more than about 10 minutes! So, I've been on the lookout for a replacement. As I said in the previous post, I thought I found it in another Herman Miller chair that I fixed up, but it went to my wife with the bad back. This of course set the stage last month for my eBay find of the year; the $135 Aeron chair in Amarillo. 

And this perfectly highlights my point in this post. Generally, you can get away with picking up a used product and get satisfyingly good results from it if it was an excellent well-built product to start with.....however, this is almost never the case with "cheap" poorly-made products from the beginning. All manufactured product are designed and constructed to a useable lifespan. Cheap products have a relatively short one, even for non-professional use, but well-built products often wear like iron long after the other has broken. Furthermore, the better products are often made to be repaired and can be at a fairly low price for the part, plus a little labor. A perfect example is the Aeron chair I bought with a gas cylinder needed replacement. It's a $35 part and 20 minute project, but there's not a good way to fix the padding on my "pain-in-the-A**" cheapo office chair it replaced!

It's Summer!

Well; it's not actually not quite summer yet, but it's close enough. Close enough for a Frugal Propellerhead to plan for the summer. For a teacher, summer means quite a bit more time on our hands to do what we want, and of course for me, that would mean working on all things having to do with computers, home audio AND photography. Unfortunately that can also mean spending money, lots of it and that's something that can't happen. So a satisfying Propellerhead summer takes a little planning.

First of all, we need to take a look at what needs to be done, then we can talk about how to deal with that in planning. First of all, my daughter's custom lavender ThinkPad X30 is a little long-in-the-tooth. It specs out as a PIII (Tualatin) processor with 1Gb of RAM running XP! Although the size, and operating system is fine for her, the hardware is past due for an update. Fortunately, the X30 is built on the same chassis as the X31 which was a whole generation (if not more) forward in technology. It's built on the Pentium "M" (Banias) platform which completely skipped the hot running P4 series. Being built on the same chassis, I can simply move the lavender lid/screen assembly straight over. I will have to repaint a new keyboard bezel which was a different part, but that's not a big deal. Maxing the RAM out to a full 2Gb will have Katie all set for another couple of years! 

The trick here is that I didn't wait to buy it this summer when I have the time. Several months ago, I came across an ad for an X31 barebones-"base" (w/o LCD assembly) on the ThinkPad Forum for a song....so I bought it and stuck it in a cabinet.

 A few months ago I started seeing 128Gb, 1.8" SSDs selling for a very low price ($125). I was working on my "Ark" project at the time and bought one for it; then I started thinking about it and realized that I should probably pick up another one to upgrade my X300 since the load on it was getting a little old and would need a reload soon anyway. This second 128Gb SSD actually came in at just below $100 so into the cabinet it went as well. 

 Around that same time, the next generation of Sandforce SSD controllers came out and I ran across a special on the 128Gb Mushkin Chronos SSD for less than the price that I gave for the 60Gb Mushkin Callista SSD a little over a year ago. 

 The next project waiting in the wings is a Windows Home Server 2011 upgrade from the original WHS that I'm running now. I can't really claim good planning for this one, but rather it's the result of good fortune! I was having an email discussion with my brother last week about some projects that he's been working on and he described several machines that he's upgrading from the older Intel socket 775 line to the more current "Sandybridge" i3/i5/i7s. One of these project was a WHS 2011 machine, so I replied by telling him about the WHS file server that I cobbled together from free and traded-for parts. The upshot is that he offered to send me his left-over 775 boards, CPUs and misc parts! Although, the socket 775 may seem old to him, it's plenty new enough for me, and with a dual core processor on board, I'll be able to upgrade to the WHS 2011 as well since it's a 64-bit operating system. 


He also sent me a few other parts which have gone into upgrading the my XP computer, my regular workstation as well as the HTPC which will be receiving the 60Gb SSD that was in the workstation. So; things are lining up to be a busy summer ahead!

The Chair

No, this isn't about the classic George Strait song. It's a quick post on one of my long-standing secret obsessions.....office chairs. OK, I have always enjoyed delving into "designer" furniture of all kinds, but have had an interest in "mid-century" modern, and particularly Herman Miller designs. Although, not mid-century by any stretch of the imagination, my favorite office chair has been the Aeron, ever since the first time I saw one. It doesn't help that you see them everywhere in print and broadcast media....even my alter-ego Dr. Gregory House MD sits in one!

They were almost mandatory for any up and coming firm in the dot-com era, so there are lots of them out there. However, these things still go for $600 and up, even for the used ones, which places them squarely in the "no-buy" zone!

A few years ago, when I was working at Texas Tech, I came across an earlier model, Equa 2 at the surplus warehouse and promptly paid the requisite $10 for it! And if you've never sat in a "high-end" office chair (like me), these things are a revelation! Unfortunately, it had torn up upholstery and padding as well as a missing arm pad. Even at that, it was nice to sit in, but then a few years ago, I came across another one at school which was about to be thrown out. It was a "low-back" and had a dead gas cylinder, but was nice in every other way. Also, my wife was just coming off of the second of her back surgeries, so the two were combined together to make one good chair for her.

So back to square one for me and a series of hand-me down office chairs....all the while, periodically looking at Aerons on eBay hoping that some miracle would befall. About a week or so ago, surfing the web while a client machine updated AND sitting on my old chair that the foam has so degenerated that you can feel the attachment bolts..... I found it! An Aeron chair in Bushland (outside Amarillo), Texas, on auction by a seller who required "local pick up", with a bad gas cylinder! The auction was for $250, on day 4 with no bids, and within the next 24 hours, the seller dropped the price, plus it was one that would take "offers". So I offered $135: he countered at $136 asking if I could indeed pick it up, to which I answered "yes" since my wife's uncle lives in Amarillo. To that, I added $35 more dollars for a gas cylinder and am now waiting impatiently to find a way to get my sub-$200 Aeron chair across the state.

Here's the upshot on this thing. Yeah it's cool looking, but there are actual reasons that it's considered to be the most popular high-end office chair in history. It's pretty much bullet-proof with a frame of aluminum. complete adjustability in every way imaginable, a breathable seat/back made of a high-tensile mesh material that they call "pellicle" in a suspension design. This is key for me since I'm naturally hot and the office with multiple computers running gets pretty warm in and of itself. It's also 90+ percent recyclable and virtually all the parts are replaceble extending it's expected service life.