What is a Refurbished Laptop?
A refurbished laptop is a laptop or a computer that has been reimbursed to the retailer or its manufacturer for a refund by a customer, or it is a computer that has just come off a lease. The computer may have had a minor defect or simply not met a customer’s expectations. Before a seller can sell a laptop back, any defective components are replaced or repaired, and the computer is then carefully examined and verified to ensure it works accurately and adequately. Any computer that goes through this process must be recognized as refurbished or reconditioned.
Tips For Buying a Refurbished Laptop:
While buying these laptops and to decide, Are Refurbished laptops good? You have to take care of these few points to be deceived by the numerous options available in the market.
- Get a One-Year Warranty if Possible: The perfect refurbished laptop should come with an assurance that the seller guarantees the product. You have to take care as you have not bought it out of the trunk of a car downtown. The product you are investing in should have a solid warranty, and the minimum time is at least a year. Some refurbished laptop warranties may be for shorter than for new products and typically do not cover battery life. Still, each vendor is different, so read the fine print before adding the item to your shopping cart. Apart from this, you also have to look for a generous return policy, so you get to examine the machine and otherwise make sure the unit suits you the best.
- Test your Laptop Right Away: You have to examine the laptop there and then and get yourself adequately satisfied. A customer should always look for a condition statement on any of the refurbished product pages. The retailer usually reveals cosmetic flaws in their product description, but not always. Apple’s site covers a general statement of standards linked to each refurbished product on sale, but if not, it does not have a condition report on each product page.
- Differentiate between Refurbished and Certified Laptop: Different online marketplaces like eBay and Craigslist do not check the condition of laptops that are for sale on their sites; they just connect sellers and buyers, and both are on their own. While online trade-in services like Gadget Salvation, Gazelle.com and others bid varying degrees of certification, their standards may vary and are not always transparent. Another great name Cesar Navarro, Gadget Salvation’s operations manager, says its items go through the corporation’s certification process, which might include hardware testing, cosmetic inspection and even a software check, to make sure the gadgets are fully functional, reset to original factory defaults with genuine operating systems and free of malware.
Pros and Cons of Refurbished Laptops
| PROS | CONS |
| Higher Performance, Lower Cost | Some vendors lightly clean and reboot the machine and call that refurbished. So, don’t get into the term ‘Refurbished.’ |
| Completely Environmentally friendly | Have short life spans |
| Shopping for refurbished products means you will find millions of reviews out there already as compared to the brand-new product. | Buying Directly from a previous owner is indeed risky |
| In some cases, buyer’s remorse sets in, and devices are simply exchanged or returned after light use. So, in that case, you actually do end up getting a practically brand-new machine at a reasonable price. | Even though many corporations replace the exterior of that specific device, your second-hand laptop may have a few cosmetic imperfections. |
What is a Certified Refurbished Laptop?
You can easily differentiate a refurbished laptop from its used counterpart in a few different but interesting ways. A used or second-hand laptop is simply sold in as-is condition, and there are not many guarantees that it will function according to you properly or last very long. On the other side, a certified refurbished laptop experiences some type of repair or upgrades by a technician to ensure that it functions well. In many scenarios, refurbished laptops even come with a guarantee.
These laptops are often used, but at the same time, it’s how they were used that may vary. Here are some reasons why a laptop might end up in the refurbished category:
- Laptops returned by many customers with a minor flaw
- Display products that cannot be sold again
- Office technology is being traded-in from year to year to keep up with the recent trends.
- Technology that is at the end of a business lease
When you select refurbished products, you could get lucky and discover yourself with a practically new device. While keeping in mind that is not always the case, you should at least get a seldom good year of use out of certified refurbished laptops – and often even longer.
What is an open box return?
A typical open-box product is defined as a product that was bought and opened but returned or exchanged before the buyer ever used it. This may happen due to several reasons, maybe the buyer or recipient did not want it, or maybe the wrapping was damaged, so it was returned as protection, even though it worked pretty well.
Thankfully, some laws in place like the US prevent companies from selling returned products as if they are brand new. You can benefit from that. Since once the “stink” of refurbishment is on a product, the price should go way down. You should ask the seller about a product’s origin and try for an open-box product. We might understand that you may not be the first owner, but you could be the first user.
So, you have to keep these things in mind. If you are lucky enough and getting that open-box return, then what else you could wish for.
Comparing Brand-New Laptops with Refurbished Ones
There are some bases on which you can compare a brand-new laptop with the refurbished one. It is also essential to give it a look as you can make a wise decision and can avoid that post-purchase dissonance.
- Price: Refurbished laptops are frequently discounted by 10 to 25 percent or more from the creative and new laptop computer retail price. That can be a considerable saving as compared to the price of a brand-new model of any product. The tradeoff is often that refurbished laptops don’t consist of the latest processors and newly released operating systems since the refurbishing process takes them off the fast-moving electronics market at least for some months.
- RAM: It is pretty evident that new laptops would feature more RAM than their previous generation, and a refurbished laptop might not have that sufficient memory. A refurbished laptop might have only 1 GB of memory, while a brand-new computer might have 4 GB. This may or may not make a change for you in your decision, depending on the system requirements of programs you need your laptop to work on.
- Hard Drive: The size of the hard drive is also different in both types of laptops. This is because memory storage becomes cheaper over time. A refurbished computer might have only a 60 GB hard drive, but a new computer might have a 320 GB hard drive. Depending on your storage requirements, you may choose to buy new or buy refurbished and then upgrade the hard drive. Another thing you can do is to increase your laptop storage space by using multiple hard drives.