they sure know how to complicate simple stuff
A CarFax for Used PCs; Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life
81–90 of 112 posts
Re: A CarFax for Used PCs; Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
From reliability perspective an used SSD is not a bad idea. Average SSD that has seen typical business / home use will become obsolete long before it reaches its TBW rating, and many drives last way beyond that. Keyboard, screen or even the motherboard are more likely to give up before the SSD.
At least in my experience SSDs are literally the only part that tends to fail. Using a used SSD( Refurbished assuming direct from manufacturer might be ok) feels like digging though someone else's stuff. Maybe they cleaned it, maybe they left business docs or other sensitive data. The risk to reward is too great.
Having IT roll up into me, I've seen way, way more batteries fail than SSDs. Screen failure [and hinge failure] is far more common than SSDs failing. Keyboard/touchpads fail more often. Charging bricks/cables also fail somewhat more than SSDs. Beyond that, in the low end of the laptop re-use market, "just blindly always buy and install a new SSD" breaks the economics pretty badly.
Look at the SMART stats, format the drive, and install your OS. For people shopping laptops under $250, that seems like a better path than a new SSD.
Re: A CarFax for Used PCs; Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life
#83Solution in search of a problem...
Re: A CarFax for Used PCs; Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
The current urban legend is swapping a junkyard 5.3 for the Chevrolet 6.0 in a U-Haul truck, rent one and switch them and return it.
I guess the joke is on you if you rent one and it already has a swapped engine.
Sometimes the early bird gets the worm, sometimes the second mouse gets the cheese.
Re: A CarFax for Used PCs; Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life
#85Other people noted this is a very bad privacy issue. Just thinking: since when laptop manufacturers encourage reuse instead of buying new? It would lower sales!
I belive user tracking is the real purpose of this tech. It would have the ability to track the user no matter what OS is installed. Windows does tracking, Google does tracking, all websites have tracking, and now they want a piece of the pie too. PCFax is just a disguise - an alterative purpose more acceptable to the public than what it really is.
And now, thinking ahead: what would be the next logical step for them? Ad popups directly from the firmware?
Re: A CarFax for Used PCs; Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is likely just something that corporate users would care about. Companies often lease PCs from IT service providers rather than own and maintain their own hardware. The owner of the hardware now has a metric they can point to for how "usable" a machine is after the initial lease. As a customer, I may not want to rent laptops that have been through who knows what sort of wear and tear no matter how cheap but if t…
"Odometer" for HDDs and SSDs are already provided in SMART data that is more or less standatized and accessible using many tools. The data is not resettable by mortals similarly to car odometers.
Everyone should test their hard drives within the return window after purchase for these kinds of errors as it is a warning and failure condition, but there is no reason to buy a caution or warning status drive. The metrics are standardized somewhat but the interpretations of the values are vendor and model specific. I’ve used CrystalDiskInfo in the past but don’t know what the state of the art in this is at the moment and this isn’t a recommendation per se. I just have backed up a lot of hard drives, and when I have block or file level access issues, there are usually SMART errors, but not always on the vendor provided tools. Sometimes the third party tools are wrong, but I had a pretty large sample size of computers that had unknown problems which is not likely representative of most computers or computer users, but the tools were helpful as far as knowing more about the hardware to inform the user, so I can see where HP is coming from. I suspect some kind of gaming of the metrics but can’t prove this. It’s not a horrible idea, but I don’t love more failure modes. I’ve seen BitLocker issues from updating firmware without turning it off first, which is cautioned against as a possibility, but if this helps with those kinds of issues too, it will be sold as a feature for the corporate market to help with fleet management.
Re: A CarFax for Used PCs; Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't: https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/resear... I don't trust HP firmware to wake the laptop from sleep in one attempt, let alone trust them to securely store their telemetry (that they won't let me see directly).
The problem was that > BitLocker essentially trusts self-encrypted drives to do their job, and defaults to the drive”s hardware encryption. But that was 2018; the result was that in 2019 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/september-24-2019-... happened: > Changes the default setting for BitLocker when encrypting a self-encrypting hard drive. Now, the default is to use software encryption for newly encrypted dr…
This is incorrect and not how Bitlocker operates at all. Bitlocker doesn't operate with self encrypted drives, instead the encryption happens on the OS level.
Re: A CarFax for Used PCs; Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life
#88This 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 anyt…
Certified Pre-Owned programs. I am surprised they are starting with Laptops. IMO, it makes more sense to start with servers. They are car-priced assets, and stand much more to gain from a multi-point inspection versus a laptop. They are also less likely to suffer from long term damage damage, such as water damage. Slap another 5 years of hardware support on it and resell for 20% above the used market. Many small and…
There is difference of usage patterns between servers and laptops. Servers are most likely run nearly entire duration they are used or leased. Maybe not loaded, but is not massive difference.
On other hand laptops might spend significant time being turned off. Or their usage patterns might affect batteries. Like how deep they were drawn. In that sense getting more telemetry on laptops is much more useful.
Re: A CarFax for Used PCs; Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life
#89Other people noted this is a very bad privacy issue. Just thinking: since when laptop manufacturers encourage reuse instead of buying new? It would lower sales! I belive user tracking is the real purpose of this tech. It would have the ability to track the user no matter what OS is installed. Windows does tracking, Google does tracking, all websites have tracking, and now they want a piece of the pie too. PCFax is ju…
>And now, thinking ahead: what would be the next logical step for them? Ad popups directly from the firmware?
Reports sent to 'someone', if you look up abortion clinics?
Careful with that axe, Eugene/ Eugenia..
Re: A CarFax for Used PCs; Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life
#90> 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…
>and drive SMART data
SMART used to be one of those "data is stored securely on X, leveraging hardware-based security measures to protect against unauthorized access or manipulation". Nowadays its trivial to wipe and is the basis of "refurbished new old stock" Amazon HDD SCAM where product turns out to be pulls from server farms with over 20K hours on them with wiped SMART showing zero hours no defects. Its faster to wipe smart than scan the drive, and more lucrative to sell as new old stock than admit its a server pull.