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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

#31

Post by 999900000999 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #19
999900000999 wrote: post #6

Seems like a horrible invasion of privacy for very little benefit. The logs are stored on an SSD , which is literally the only part you need to replace when donating or reselling a PC. Any enterprise company should have a policy ensuring SSD destruction. Most laptops will last a long time assuming they aren't abused. I guess the SSD wears out, but that's a 50$ part.

> Any enterprise company should have a policy ensuring SSD destruction. Why? Drives should already be encrypted, at which point you just lose the key and it's unrecoverable.

It's just easier.

You don't have to worry about IT forgetting to wipe a drive or something.

You have a policy that says we take the SSD out before sending it to the reseller/donating.

A used SSD is a bad idea anyway, everything else on a laptop can more or less work indefinitely

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

#33

Post by cosmic_cheese »

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #21
ok123456 wrote: post #14

Is there any value added here? Carfax exists because of the possibility of buying a car with extensive damage that looks cosmetically ok. Additionally, the service records they collect indicate that a vehicle has undergone regular maintenance. Computers, for the most part, aren't getting in major accidents and reentering the stream of commerce. Additionally, there's no significant mechanical maintenance required, exc…

This, I think, is the part that confuses me. While there is a level of uncertainty, when buying used computer, the cost tends to magnitude smaller than a new car and even for fancish lappies likely sub 1k ( maybe that changes when we start accounting for gaming laptops, but those are unlikely to be corporate fleet, which I assume is the consideration here? ). I initially though HP found some new way to fleece data ou…

There’s plenty of models of business notebooks and thin and lights, many of which are preferred by a certain customer segment over cheaper options due to higher grade design, materials, etc that can breach the $1k mark in the used market if sold within the first year or two of manufacture.

I don’t know how much value it’d add, though it would be pretty interesting to see exactly how much of a Ship of Theseus that used laptop you just bought is, if this system tracks part serials and such. Could also be useful for sniffing out use of substandard/knockoff third party parts, which could be of legitimate interest to buyers (I wouldn’t necessarily trust a third party power handling module from AliExpress for example).

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

#34

Post by kube-system »

ok123456 wrote: post #16
fred_is_fred wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other purpose of a CarFax is to validate or attempt to validate that the mileage reported is accurate or not. Is there an equivalent of mileage for a CPU or motherboard?

People aren't forging SMART drive diagnostics. These are <$100 components anyway.

SMART stats are cleared on secondhand or "refurbished" drives quite frequently

e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42864788

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

#35

Post by n8cpdx »

ok123456 wrote: post #14

Is there any value added here? Carfax exists because of the possibility of buying a car with extensive damage that looks cosmetically ok. Additionally, the service records they collect indicate that a vehicle has undergone regular maintenance. Computers, for the most part, aren't getting in major accidents and reentering the stream of commerce. Additionally, there's no significant mechanical maintenance required, exc…

I was wondering the other day about something like this for retro computing hardware, including game consoles.

You can buy a device that looks perfectly good, but has rusty parts, leaking capacitors, shoddy/counterfeit replacement parts, and who knows what else. And if it wasn’t previously opened (they seemingly always are), you don’t know what was done to it.

I don’t think you can really solve that through tech, it’s really more of a record keeping issue. Which actually seems to be mostly how carfax works?

I’ve thought about fixing up consoles and selling them (more for cost recovery and to free up space than for profit), but I wonder about how to share information about the work and the risks in a way that the purchaser is likely to understand and appreciate.

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

#36

Post by michaelt »

jamesgill wrote: post #29

Having access to fine-grained usage and health information for each device in their fleet can help IT managers decide which devices are sent to which users, as well as when maintenance is scheduled Based only my own experience in large enterprises, the usual process is to EOL new laptops after about three years, regardless of condition. There's a whole sandwich of business and financial agreements built around this,…

Right, but you have some laptops coming back from leaving workers. Laptops issued to interns. Windows laptops issued to people who come back and say they need Linux. Laptops loaned to people while their main laptop was being repaired. And of course the dreaded no-fault-found returns.

Of course you wouldn't want to be locked in to HP hardware only. And hopefully you've got an endpoint management tool which is gathering at least some of this data anyway...

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

#37

Post by dietr1ch »

neilv wrote: post #18

> By embedding telemetry capabilities directly within the firmware, we ensure that device health and usage data is captured the moment it is collected. This data is stored securely on HP SSD drives, leveraging hardware-based security measures to protect against unauthorized access or manipulation. What I see are more technological affordances for closed firmware behavior of the device, increasing complexity, and prov…

> > What I see are more technological affordances for closed firmware behavior of the device, increasing complexity, and providing additional opportunity for, and cover for, secret surveillance, backdoors, and other malware.

All this surveillance just in case you want to have an easier time selling a laptop. I'd rather have this time spent building a better laptop that sells itself because it's a battery swap and a CPU re-paste away from feeling like new.

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

#38

Post by lwn »

This feels to me like HP is trying to formalize a whole new business around second-hand hardware — not just selling off returns, but really building a controlled ecosystem for trade-ins, refurb, and resale. My guess is they want to keep that value in-house rather than letting third-party refurbishers or resellers capture it.

The Carfax reference stood out to me. It seems more like a feel-good marketing move than anything with real substance — just enough to trigger that association of “trusted, inspected, certified.” Not necessarily bad, but definitely more about perception than transparency.

Overall, I think they’re trying to rebrand “used hardware” into something safe, premium, and profitable — under the HP umbrella, of course.

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

#40

Post by robocat »

mrweasel wrote: post #7

For people outside the US (maybe?), CarFax has no meaning, so the analogy is a bit confusing. The whole thing make no sense. They plan to store the report on the SSD (but not just any SSD, an HP SSD), so that the telemetry is retained between operating system install. I'll give them points for doing on device data collection, but what if I replace the SSD? Maybe they don't plan on making that user replaceable, but th…

> but what if I replace the SSD?

Also many companies want to destroy the SSD on selling old laptops. Paranoid about security and thinking they need Pentagon level security theatre. But companies should delete potential liabilities.

But I'd never allow an enterprise SSD to be reformatted. If some old data leaked from the business and the business was taken to court, the prosecution might argue it leaked from SSDs and you couldn't prove otherwise.

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