Some Black Friday deals are wild. A store might offer only a couple of units of a particular TV, discounted by 66%. There might be a few pieces of a flagship smartphone at your local electronics store at half price. These are designed to entice customers through the door, and if you’re brave enough, ensure the cold for up to 12 hours to get that bargain of the year. But one of the key observations about looking at Amazon’s Computing and Components section every Black Friday, particularly this year, is that most of the discounts are for complete trash. After the headline external storage discounts, it’s just page after page of USB cables and smartphone holders. But one thing did catch my eye: an entire PC, for only £57/$61! How can an entire x86 desktop PC be sold for so little? We did the only thing worth doing: we purchased it.
[…]The listing on Amazon is for a refurbished Dell Optiplex 780 – an office form factor machine that is very typical of one you might see in an office that hasn’t been updated yet (this is probably where this unit came from). The listing for the machine promises a few things: a CPU at 2.6 GHz, 4 GB of DDR3, a 160 GB HDD, and 802.11abg Wi-Fi, as well as Windows 10. What we received was a 2.93 GHz processor (woohoo!), 2×2 GB of DDR3, a 250 Gb HDD (woohoo!), no Wi-Fi (boo), and a full copy of Windows 10. The fact that this comes will a full blown copy of Windows 10 Pro, which even at its cheapest is around $20, astounds me. Even if the whole unit is a refurb, that’s the one part that is most likely new: and given that the value of the contents are around $30, that only leaves $10 for the actual hardware.
Better these old office refurbs get sold on Amazon than dumped on a landfill or torn apart by children inhaling toxic fumes in India. These kinds of machines are great for alternative operating systems like Haiku, too.
Whooo… they bought a refurb nearly decade old PC Dell can put Win 10 on that old slug because they license it in mass for all their PCs. That said the license is probably tied to the board is it won’t do you any good otherwise.
Windows 10 probably barely runs on that machine with only 4GB and an HDD …. your bi annual upgrade is gonna take probably a half a day or more…
The cost of the hardware to dell is *zero* since it’s already been sold and lived out it’s usefulness somewhere else… then probalby been recycled by dell. Basically you gave dell $60 for a PC you could have picked up for free off the curb… funnily enough we are replacing one of these and 2 HP’s of similar vintage just this week at work.
Even funnier is that the going rate on ebay for those is half that much… the Black friday ad was literally a scam.
Yes, it’s old hardware. Yes, it will be slow. No, it wont run the latest games
BUT it’s good enough! Windows 10 support (however slow) means it will be patched. And what else if the fate of this box? Landfill? Surely this is better?
In practice a performance drop is not what I have found at all. I find Win 10 tends to be a performance upgrade over Win 7 or Win 8, with all other things equal. 4Gb of RAM is just fine, if the HD is slow it’s slow for all OSes., Maybe there are ways to tweak Win 10 to kill off it’s performance on old hardware, but that would have to be a deliberate act because the OS defaults actually seems to improve things.
Windows 10 is only an upgrade if the machine has an SSD… if not then it will suck and probably kill the HDD in a few months. Windows 7 on the other hand doesn’t hammer the HDD so hard after stuff loads it just stays cached it runs better the longer you leave it on to a point (like a few days maybe).
And i say that based on experience of it happening to every machine I’ve had windows 10 and and HDD in… it’s just trash. Put and SSD in and it’s fine HDDs just don’t have enough IOPS.
Can’t say I agree, might experience is quite the opposite.
I wonder what you’ve done to cause that poor performance?
In my opinion all operating systems suck when run on a HDD. Windows 7 included. Linux included.
Linux on an older system with HDD sucks. I tried one a few weeks ago. Something like 30 seconds to boot. Then launching apps like Firefox takes multiple seconds.
Once you go SSD you never go back. 5 second boots and instant application launch.
Yeah, I run Win10 Pro in a VM on a Linux host with only 2GB of RAM allotted to the VM. Runs just fine for what I need it for. Of course the host system is running on an SSD. The VM feels way faster than my other laptopswith 4GB of RAM running Linux on spinning HDDs.
…my 2010 HP Z600 runs modern games just fine. Sure, it’s a workstation, and not a generic office PC, but it’s 9 years old and still plays games on max settings.
It does help i stuck a GTX 970 and a pair of high clock Xeon X5667’s in it
“Windows 10 probably barely runs on that machine with only 4GB and an HDD …. your bi annual upgrade is gonna take probably a half a day or more…”
I still have a Thinkpad T420 in use.
For office-work these machines are quite capable.
Thank you intel for a decade of cpu-stagnation. 😉
Fedora still runs great on my T420.
Heh a friend of mine has in the past prononced it Fee Dee Or AH…. raise your pitch forks! And I do think Linux would be a better fit for this PC than windows 10 assuming it has an HDD.
I ordered my T420 with an SSD from the factory :), but yes, Linux handles HDs better then Windows does. You can still tell your using an HD with write heavy operations, but the difference is not as dramatic.
“Only” 4GB RAM
It depends what you’re doing. 4GB is plenty for most web browsing and casual gaming. And sticking more RAM into computers has been a performance upgrade since computers were invented. Most machines built since 2006 (including the T420) can support at least 8GB RAM, and since second-hand DDR3 is so cheap, there’s no real reason not to upgrade your system
“and since second-hand DDR3 is so cheap”
New ones are dirt cheap as well.
A new 2x4GB DDR3 SO-DIMM kit goes for as low as 25€ here in austria.
There is realy no reason for RAM to be a limiting factor on these machines.
It was probably a third party who buys equipment like this in bulk rather then Dell. Optiplex 780s are too old to show up on Dell refurb sites these days.
$60 dollars sounds about right for someone to refurb a machine and ship it.
Do they do “black friday” in europe? It’d be a bit weird given that “thanksgiving” is an american holiday.
I didn’t see any black friday tech bargains in these past couple years. It’s not that I didn’t look, stores certainly advertised black friday like crazy but nothing I’ve been watching came down in price even a little bit. I’ve seen awesome deals in years past, but not this year. It makes me wonder to what extent whitehouse tarrifs are killing bargains. It could just be a coincidence but then again, in the years before trump’s ever increasing import taxes, holiday sales were noticeably more substantial.
Black Friday/Cyber Monday have been around for years in Europe but the past couple have been non-events, at least in the UK. Too often prices get inflated just before with the result that the BF “discount” prices are higher than they were a month previously. Even Amazon has given up and its BF deals are just the old tut that it has struggled to shift all year.
weckart,
Out of curiosity, just now I compared a few random tech products on amazon.com (USD) and amazon.co.uk (GBP) …
Note: I converted the GBP->USD currency using duckduckgo.
It doesn’t get much closer than this.
UK price 18% higher
UK price 8% higher
UK price 53% higher
I looked up iphone X only to discovered that amazon.co.uk doesn’t have any iphones new or used. I guess this was part of apple’s deal with amazon to ban competing vendors… grrr, someone in the EU should look into that.
I’ve always heard that things in the UK were more expensive, but does anyone know where those additional sums of money go? Is it taxes? Technically the US prices are without taxes, and here in NY we pay about 8% more on top of advertised prices, Do the UK prices include all taxes?
Yep, all consumer prices in the EU need to be advertised including taxes. However, if you’re buying from a company that sells more than a certain amount to your location, the taxes are based on where you are rather than where the seller is. The UK VAT rate is 20%, so unless you’ve registered another EU location with an Amazon.co.uk account, the prices you’re seeing are including that.
Since when does US corporate greed have a geographic boundary?
They even have Black Friday sales in Pakistan and India. Go figure.
I had the mini-tower version of this running as a home server for the last few years. 🙂 The thing was solid, and this one would be a fun little *nix server for someone.
Nowadays, my household only runs on older Thinkpads (writing this on my T430). The only reason I don’t go for desktop is that I need the laptop’s battery to handle blackouts. Refurbs are the way! Stick an SSD, and 16 gigs of ram, and you’re in business! Win10 runs just fine 🙂
Anything with a core 2 duo or better is fine, upgrade the ram, toss in a SSD and this is fast enough for web surfing or office tasks.
Just as an example i use a nine year old ThinkPad x201 with 8 GB of ram a SSD and Arch Linux with i3 and i am one semester away from finishing my masters degree doing all of my work on it and it still feels rather “Snappy”
You can get a great used office PC these days on Ebay on the cheap without breaking the bank. I recently bought 3 ( I’ve been talked to about it already) HP Elitedesk 800 G1 with Intel core i5 4570/4590 from ebay for around $118 each including shipping and sales tax. The hard drives in them were somewhat slow so I upgraded to SSD, and now these machines are flying. They make excellent machines for Win 10, Linux .. and also great Hackintoshes (according to youtube videos).
I bought the same computer in april : EliteDesk 800 G1, i5-4590T, 150€
Added an SSD.
Works great, supports 3 screens, 6 USB ports, … in a very small form factor.
I just remove the cover when I use it for long compilations, it helps cooling.
This looks like spam to me.
Can’t believe Chinese sellers haven’t bought all these machines in order to strip them for parts.
Also, observe how de-coupling the OS from the hardware results in commodity (aka cheap) hardware, while keeping the OS coupled to the hardware (via “ROMs” provided by the hardware vendor and having all kinds of custom functionality for the camera and whatnot) results in the hardware becoming worthless at the manufacturer’s whim, forcing people to buy new and expensive hardware.
kurkosdr,
They might take them for recycling, but “buying” them is probably not economically viable. Not to mention the new trade war we have to deal with now. Up until about last year, china was a big importer of US recycled products. but about the time trump’s tariffs went into affect china stopped accepting our recycled products. You can’t imagine the damage that’s done to our recycling programs. Across the eastern coast many recycling programs are overturning decades of recycling norms and instructed us to stop putting any glass and many previously recycled plastics (including plastic bags) out for recycling, they have to go in the trash now. You hear all the time how much damage this is causing, and yet not only are we failing to improve, too many politicians are actually making things egregiously worse by focusing on deregulating business and removing environmental protections. 🙁
I agree. Unbundling obviously gives consumers the most flexibility and allows product lifetime to be maximized. The plain truth is that manufacturers have a vested interest in selling more products more often, so they deliberately make it difficult for consumers to repurpose old electronics, which is very short cited in terms of the long term health of the planet. Of course the manufacturers will say “not our problem”, but then it’s the same manufacturers who lobby for fewer consumer and environmental protections.