With the best will in the world, we could all claim that buying a refurbished PC or Laptop is part of our attempt to save the world and, where in some cases this may be true, there is one overriding factor - price. You can buy a refurbished laptop that was designed for business use at a fraction of it's original cost. Take cars for example, if you have £6000 to spend, would you rather buy a new 2009 Kia Picanto or a 2007 Ford Focus? The same applies to laptops. You can buy a brand new Acer, Asus, Novatech, iTronics for under £300 and even some of the bigger firms will have their low end models Dell Inspiron, HP Pavillion and Toshiba Satellite to name but a few and they all come with reasonably high specifications including large hard drive and dual core processors but, what they don't come with is longevity. Most cheap, new laptops available from general retailers will be the lowest end available from the manufacturers and they will have used the cheapest parts available to keep their costs down or they will sell expensive add-ons like security software or warranties to increase their profit margin. Another thing to note is that, if you opted out of the expensive 5 year warranty, where will you go if something goes wrong? Buy a new, new laptop? Look for spare parts? Very few of these cheap laptops will have spare parts readily available whereas parts for a refurbished laptop are easily found on places like eBay and even Dell, HP and other major manufacturers can source parts for machines that were originally made as far back as the 1990's The business laptops such as the Dell Latitude, IBM Thinkpad and Hewlett Packard "N" Series will originally have come with price tags around £1000 and would have probably been purchased with a warranty or service agreement. When this ends, they will become available to companies like EOL to clean down and refurbish for resale at bargain prices. Let's look at what you'll be using your laptop for. - Surfing the Internet
- Sending and opening emails
- Instant Messaging
- Downloading music
- Watching DVDs
- Storing and sharing photo's
- Basic home accounting
- Word Processing
- The odd cheeky game of Solitaire?
All of this, and probably a few more besides will be easily handled on a simple well-refurbished laptop without the cost of even the lowest priced new laptop. Oh, and in case you were wondering how buying refurbished laptops helps save the planet, how about these numbers-
The manufacture of the average 24kg desktop computer is estimated to consume 240kgs of fossil fuels, 22kgs of chemicals and 1,500kgs of water just in its manufacture! It really is a simple calculation! |
