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A CarFax for Used PCs: Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life

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Re: A CarFax for Used PCs: Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life

#21

Post by gessha »

herf wrote: post #17

The average car on the road is over 12 years old, and maybe a laptop has maybe 1/3 as long a lifecycle? Not sure that tracking "Wh" as a replacement for "mileage" is that useful, it's either time to replace a battery and SSD or it's not - and perhaps we should have scheduled maintenance for removing dust from your fans? An old PC that has a hard drive replaced with an SSD and a fresh battery is usually a great thing,…

A well-built laptop can last you just as long. I’ve been rocking a tricked out Dell XPS for 9 years now and it’s still going strong. It’s really hard to find something better on the market. If I could only change the motherboard with a slightly updated APU like the strix halo or current gen AMD solution, I couldn't be happier.

Re: A CarFax for Used PCs: Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life

#23

Post by akeck »

specialp wrote: post #19

I needed a windows laptop. My work laptop is a Mac. Unless you are doing extremely intensive things that will benefit from technology gains, buying a new laptop makes little sense. The performance of an off lease enterprise laptop for $500 is great. I purchased one from Dell, but it shut down at high cpu which indicates a cooling or other issue. In return they sent me an even better laptop for no additional charge. P…

I had a similar experience. We're mostly Apple at home, but I bought an X1 Carbon reburb from MicroCenter a few years ago to run desktop Linux. It's become one of my favorite pieces of tech. Ultra-light but solid with a nice-feeling keyboard and trackpad.

Re: A CarFax for Used PCs: Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life

#24

Post by Apocryphon »

lproven wrote: post #22

Did anyone else read this and think "WTF is Carfax?" or is it just me? This is a bad headline, IMHO, because that is a service of some kind for 1 kind of person in just 1 country, and to the entire rest of the human race it's meaningless.

Americans tend to drive and many have gone through the experience of buying used cars. HP and Carfax are both U.S. companies. Should an American take umbrage if a British article discussing Deliveroo had a headline referencing Tesco because it’s meaningless to the entire rest of the human race?

Re: A CarFax for Used PCs: Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life

#25

Post by jlarocco »

SG- wrote: post #5

is there even a used market for laptops other than MacBooks?

There used to be, when new laptops were thousands of dollars, and it was easier to swap out parts and the batteries were removable. I learned a ton about Linux playing with Slackware on a $50 used laptop back in the mid 2000s.

Not so sure I'd bother with one any more, though. Hard to justify when there are $200 new options on Amazon.

Re: A CarFax for Used PCs: Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life

#26

Post by hakfoo »

josho wrote: post #11
awnird wrote: post #2

I would love to see a program like this succeed. There are huge hurdles in getting partners though. The strength of Carfax is the enormous number of data sources they use, and the enormous amount of money they pay for access to those sources. A typical Carfax report can include data from the OEM, dealership, government agencies, police agencies, insurance companies, and repair shops (both big groups and small indepen…

Why? What problem does this solve? With a car it’s common for people to not maintain correctly or to get in a major accident and not disclose. What are the common factors that cause a computer to prematurely wear out? I can imagine there are lots of hypothetical risks, but how common are these? And how easy are they to mask?

There used to be the claim that "if you overclock your CPU/GPU, it would blow a fuse and the manufacturer could deny a RMA". Not sure if it ever actually happened, or if it was just an urban legend.

I could see a system management controller that blew fuses to track known potentially hazardous situations-- "Internal temperature while operating exceeded NNN degrees for XXX seconds" or "power surge in excess of NNN volts registered on this rail." Maybe a case for "paired part replaced" but that's more informational than accusatory-- a legitimate repair or upgrade could be an increase on any "health metric" they want to show.

But you'd want it someplace like, as I said, fuses on a SMC, maybe viewable in the setup screen, rather than a SSD which is not only easy to swap, but has legitimate reasons to do so (plenty of refurbishers install new SSDs because they're a cheap boost, or because they're sourcing from companies who have a "destroy the old drive on retirement" policy.

Re: A CarFax for Used PCs: Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life

#27

Post by sixothree »

Apocryphon wrote: post #24
lproven wrote: post #22

Did anyone else read this and think "WTF is Carfax?" or is it just me? This is a bad headline, IMHO, because that is a service of some kind for 1 kind of person in just 1 country, and to the entire rest of the human race it's meaningless.

Americans tend to drive and many have gone through the experience of buying used cars. HP and Carfax are both U.S. companies. Should an American take umbrage if a British article discussing Deliveroo had a headline referencing Tesco because it’s meaningless to the entire rest of the human race?

Carfax also inserts themselves into the process of buying new cars too.

Re: A CarFax for Used PCs: Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life

#28

Post by sixothree »

josho wrote: post #11
awnird wrote: post #2

I would love to see a program like this succeed. There are huge hurdles in getting partners though. The strength of Carfax is the enormous number of data sources they use, and the enormous amount of money they pay for access to those sources. A typical Carfax report can include data from the OEM, dealership, government agencies, police agencies, insurance companies, and repair shops (both big groups and small indepen…

Why? What problem does this solve? With a car it’s common for people to not maintain correctly or to get in a major accident and not disclose. What are the common factors that cause a computer to prematurely wear out? I can imagine there are lots of hypothetical risks, but how common are these? And how easy are they to mask?

I agree. The status of a laptop is 100% defined by its current status and not by its history. Battery cycles and screen time don't need this.

If HP was actually serious about keeping laptops out of landfills they would stop selling machines with 4GB of RAM. BestBuy currently has 18 HP laptop models that sell with 4GB.

They are literally selling e-waste.

Re: A CarFax for Used PCs: Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life

#29

Post by margalabargala »

tokai wrote: post #12

Rich coming from HP. They have trailed blazed how blatant planned obsolescence can be done in printers, and though its not hard data I have seen plenty HP laptops just burn themselves out after some years of use. They can definitely build better products without user data, just stop working so hard on making them crap.

This is exactly what one expects coming from HP.

Re: A CarFax for Used PCs: Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life

#30

Post by dv_dt »

The key self-inflicted difficulty with PC laptop vendors is that they can't help but dilute the value of their own laptop model lines. Even when they build a solid pc laptop model - sooner or later the marketing dept comes along and pitches a low-cost cannibalization of the model lines.

Macbooks sell used because they haven't been diluted, but as a buyer who is willing to buy quality used equipment - I'm not willing to try an sift out is this the good lattitude model year or the shitty one. Was this the good years for the Carbons or after they injected a low cost line with the same name but one letter difference.

Also, bizzare manufacturer specific laptop customizations, especially from HP are usually a big minus - eg a while back they had 3gb vid cards when everything else at that grade was 4gb or weird incompatible bioses with "carfax" tracking bs

Really they do they same with desktops too - it's why I build my own desktops.

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