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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

#91

Post by rasz »

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?

Im guessing the brilliant part of this strategy was copied from Apple - laptop wont work with non paired SSD. No SSD you buy new HP laptop.

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

#92

Post by IgorPartola »

alexpotato wrote: post #17
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…

This reminds me of an old story about Hertz and Ford Mustangs. Goes something like this: - Ford makes the original Mustang (which everyone loves) - Ford makes different versions of the Mustang (some more powerful than others e.g. the Shelby) - Hertz had a special custom Shelby model made for them - You could rent that special model from Hertz - So, people would buy a lower end Mustang, rent the higher end Mustang fro…

I have also heard of people swapping parts with rental cars, including tires. And apparently some rental agencies will mark their tires to make sure you didn’t swap them.

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

#93

Post by potato3732842 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #92
alexpotato wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of an old story about Hertz and Ford Mustangs. Goes something like this: - Ford makes the original Mustang (which everyone loves) - Ford makes different versions of the Mustang (some more powerful than others e.g. the Shelby) - Hertz had a special custom Shelby model made for them - You could rent that special model from Hertz - So, people would buy a lower end Mustang, rent the higher end Mustang fro…

I have also heard of people swapping parts with rental cars, including tires. And apparently some rental agencies will mark their tires to make sure you didn’t swap them.

the min-wage guy at uhaul isn't checking the inner dual all that carefully.

6x 22.5 tires cost a lot more than 3x of their biggest truck rental.

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

#94

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

jansper39 wrote: post #87
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's incorrect? The part of the official MS announcement that it's done in software now, or that it used to trust drive-level hardware encryption (as shown in the above vulnerability)?

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

#95

Post by haiku2077 »

potato3732842 wrote: post #93
IgorPartola wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have also heard of people swapping parts with rental cars, including tires. And apparently some rental agencies will mark their tires to make sure you didn’t swap them.

the min-wage guy at uhaul isn't checking the inner dual all that carefully. 6x 22.5 tires cost a lot more than 3x of their biggest truck rental.

Rental companies are starting to run their vehicles through booths that scan the vehicle from every angle for automated inspections

https://www.uveye.com/rentals/

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

#96

Post by mystified5016 »

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.

Why take the risk? If you remove the drive when decommissioning a machine you now have 100% certainty that there is no possible data leak and it costs nothing but two minutes of labor.

If you care at all about data leaks, there's literally no reason to not destroy decomissioned frives and a lot of very real potential risks in not destroying it.

It may be "nicer" to a hypothetical second user, but you don't care about them and new drives are dirt cheap anyway.

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

#97

Post by mystified5016 »

Hasz wrote: post #44
lwn wrote: post #38

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 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…

How many enterprises want to use two or three generation old second-hand leased servers?

As a homelabber I can see the sense, but as the IT guy at a small company it doesn't sound like a great deal.

If I were in a situation where I needed some physical machines, didn't care how old they are, and budget was an issue, I'd just go to eBay. Just get something cheap and own it outright without some corporation sticking their nose into the process.

I imagine the market segment willing to accept old and refurbed servers, yet requires some SLA from the vendor is not terribly large. Almost all businesses would be better served by owning last generation servers outright or simply using AWS.

Then again, we are talking about an industry that's happy paying tens of thousands of dollars in AWS bills for an application that can reasonably run on a single server from 2016. So there's no inherent logic at play.

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

#99

Post by khedoros1 »

kmoser wrote: post #63
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…

AFAIK, at least some repairs done by non-dealers are never reported to Carfax, making it prone to false negatives.

Maintenance too. There was about a decade that I took my car to the repair place within walking distance of home for regular maintenance (oil, brakes, shocks, tires, etc). I took it somewhere else after moving, and they asked if I really hadn't done any maintenance in the past 10 years.

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

#100

Post by crusty »

On topic / off topic: This has me thinking about the current state of user replaceable internals.

I wonder to what extent the structure of corporate laptop fleet management ( ie. Lease and return less the ssd because... security) dictated which components could and couldn't be soldered down, versus a happy coincidence of potential gains, as the ssd has the least to gain by being soldered? But even if it did, would the requirements of Big Inc. have prevented that?

And for those that do solder their storage, have there been ramifications in accessing this market? Do companies with strict policies on data loss risks have black lists for devices with soldered storage? I'm guessing it's hard to use apple as a comparison point here because it was never really welcome in corporate fleets.

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