Oh refurbished discount products, how my Scottish heart sings for your temptingly low prices. But alas, once the dream of savings is realized, the song I find in my heart is "Lemon Tree" by Peter Paul and Mary. Woe betide he who is smitten by the sweet flower of savings for its fruit is bitter.

4/6/2010 5:57:39 PM

Depends on what you buy. I have bought a lot of refurbished stuff and had great success. Just make sure you buy refurbished stuff that has a decent warranty just in case. But I think I have only had 1 thing that I needed to send back within a warranty, the others performed like new.

[Edited on April 6, 2010 at 6:04 PM. Reason : ]

4/6/2010 6:03:35 PM

Oh it does- and the product worked eventually. It just required seating (not reseating mind you, but actually seating it in the first place) the video card, changing a couple bios settings, reformatting the HDD, and reinstalling windows.

Really though, the only refurbished products I have ever had consistent problems with are Linksys routers.

Edit: oh and the PC speaker wasn't connected, so there was no bios post beep . I actually managed to do about 90% of this while on hold with customer service too.

[Edited on April 6, 2010 at 6:09 PM. Reason : more]

4/6/2010 6:06:42 PM

I think if you're buying refurb from a company that still gives you a good warranty, there's nothing to worry about. I have no problem buying refurbs from Apple or Dell. I tend to stay away from a lot of other stuff though just because the price or warranty doesn't offer any benefit. Canon is a good example imo. I looked at a bunch of Canon refurb DSLRs and kept passing because of a 3 month warranty. I ended up finding that Adorama offers an in house warranty on them for 1 year so I bought one and saved a little over 20%.

What exactly did you buy that gave you issues anyway?

4/6/2010 6:15:33 PM

my netbook is refurbished and i use it every day. i'm probably the cheapest person on this website (just ignore my car habbit).

4/6/2010 6:16:12 PM

http://www.jr.com/asus/pe/ASU_CG529009_hy_RB/

Was on sale briefly for 499. After looking up the part costs, I suppose the deal was more than worth it despite the poor out of the box performance. It's actually strange but that description seems to be missing quite a few features.

Optical drive ejecting a disc just ripped off the plastic front plate to the case. Sigh... well now it looks like what it cost at least.

[Edited on April 6, 2010 at 6:26 PM. Reason : sigh]

4/6/2010 6:24:58 PM

^ just 2 weeks ago, someone I know bought a NEW HP with the 3Ghz i7, and a true discrete GPU (mid end ATI with 1GB ram) for that same price.

4/6/2010 8:25:34 PM

The description on the site is a little misleading. The GeForce GTX 260 is a normal off the shelf version of the card with discrete vram. It also came with an 802.11N card, SPDIF port, and eSATA port. The SPDIF port is essential for me.

The i7 processor was most likely an 800 series rather than the 900 series too. Still I'm amazed they were able to get a new one for $499 - did that include shipping w/o tax? I mean you're lucky to get just a 3ghz ish core i7 for under $450 wholesale by itself. If so that might have been the way to go. I probably would have replaced the video card though since I'm playing around with CUDA and physx right now. If I wasn't that would have probably been great though, since SOME of the mid-range ATI cards have pretty amazing performance for their price point.

[Edited on April 6, 2010 at 11:08 PM. Reason : ]

4/6/2010 11:01:41 PM