What is Refurbished Laptop | Every Things You Need to Know

Do you want to know what is refurbished laptop or what does it mean if a laptop is refurbished?  What things to consider before buying these refurbished laptops? You are on the right spot to know the answer of this question.

We see a lot of misunderstanding about the refurbished laptop as a totally viable product. However, there is reluctance among consumers and they prefer to spend more money rather than buy one of these laptop.

Refurbished products seem like those black sheep that nobody wants, but this conception is very unfair.

We have analyzed how stores and their refurbished laptops work being a key to explain to you if it is worth buying one or not.

See Also: How to Repair the Laptop: Problems with Solutions

It is said that, we invite you to free yourselves of prejudices and open your mind because it will surprise you.

What is a Refurbished Laptop?

Generally, it is an unsealed product that has been reviewed by the company and has verified that it works perfectly at a lower price.

Once you unseal a piece of personal property, such as a laptop, it depreciates quite a bit because it loses the status of “new” to become “used”.

However, they are not used products because they come with a 3-yearsWarrantee (in United States) and are checked before sale to verify that they work without problems.

It is said that, I advise you to see the terms and conditions of the refurbished product in the store you are buying.

Refurbished laptops are not manufactured, but their stock or inventory is reduced to customer returns or display units that the store has had.

For this reason, the refurbished laptop may come from:

• Returns from customers who have had the laptop for 1 day or have used their right of withdrawal 15 or 30 days after purchasing the product
• Display units that come without a box
• Products that have simply been unsealed

Therefore, eliminate from your head the image that you have at a general level of the reconditioned product, because it is not like that.

See Also: Things to Consider before Buying a Custom Laptop

In the case of graphics cards, it is very possible that you will see several refurbished ones that are sold because speculators have bought them and have not been able to place them at the price they wanted.

What if it doesn’t meet my expectations? It can be returned like any other product, since we have the right of withdrawal.

Differences with refurbished

You have to differentiate reconditioned products from refurbished ones because there is a world of difference.

Refurbished products are products that have been sent to the manufacturer for repair or revision, which have a 1-year warranty in most cases.

It is more like the used laptop, but with the nuance that it has been reviewed by the manufacturer and works perfectly (or so it claims).

You will not see many products of these types in stores because they are rarer than reconditioned ones.

Things to Consider When buying a refurbished Laptop

We consider it useful to inform you of several tricks that can help you to see what state the laptop is in when you receive it. Basically, it is a quick check to see how it has been used and what condition it is in.

All these precautions can be put into practice once the equipment is purchased.

1. Crystal Disk Info to check Drive Health

This free program allows us to access the SMART of the drives to see how many hours the hard drive has been on, how many GB it has written, its health status, the rate of read errors, critical warnings, etc.

See Also: How to know the Serial Number of a Laptop

In addition, it allows you to see the temperature and health of the unit you want. This will help us get closer to knowing what the actual use of the refurbished laptop has been.

If you see a few hours on or number of times on below 15, it means that it is like new one.

2. Learn about Battery Degradation

You already know that the battery has a useful life and it degrades, which means subtracting MAH as time goes by.

As a consequence, we have less autonomy than the official one and there are very short warranty periods regarding the battery (6 months for some manufacturers).

There is a way that Windows tells us about battery degradation, and we explain it in checking the battery status.

You can see how many times it has been used, the capacity (MWH) that the battery has left with respect to the design capacity.

3. HWMonitor to see the temperatures

This will not reflect the use that has been given to the PC, but it does allow us to see what conditions it is in to rule out possible anomalies.

Look especially at the GPU, CPU and units, although there may be some value that catches our attention, such as the motherboard.

It is not interesting to have a refurbished laptop that at rest puts the CPU at 50ºC and when loaded it approaches 80-90º.

See Also: How to remove the Hard Drive from a Laptop

I know that many gaming laptops come to withstand high temperatures, but it is not ideal because you are approaching the tjMax of the chip.

This helps us understand how the “unseen” works because most people tend to focus on cosmetic flaws, not what’s under the hood. You can download HWMonitor for free.

4. CPU-Z to certify refurbished Laptop

It will help us to assess that the components match what we have bought, lest any of its parts have been manipulated during this period.

In the case of RAM memories, it will be more complicated because manufacturers do not usually specify brands, but only establish GB and MHz

The processor and the GPU will be 99% what you see on the data sheet because they are soldered through a BGA socket, so I don’t think you should look much there.

Where else you can fix your eyes is on hard drives, and it’s something you can also do with CrystalDiskInfo.

Even so, I want to stress the importance of observing that M.2 SSDs are compliant, as is the case with PCIe 4.0 SSDs.

In those cases, I recommend you go to CrystalDiskMark to check that they give the speed they should.

Is buying a Refurbished Laptop a good idea?

Yes, especially when the price is very good compared to the original ones. It is clear that we will only go to this type of product when its price is attractive, otherwise, it makes no sense to buy something that comes without any accessories and unsealed.

See Also: My Laptop won’t TURN ON: What is the Solution

Is it an alternative to the original one: In my opinion, no, it is an alternative to refurbished ones and a second-hand laptop that offers more guarantees and more security to the buyer.

I understand that a refurbished product is compared to an original product because they have the same warranty period for the buyer, but we can never say that it is an alternate of the newly developed product.

We hope this information has been helpful to you. If you have any questions, you can comment below and we will respond shortly. Do you have refurbished laptops? Any bad experience?