I have been looking online for various things and I often come across refurbished items. What have been your experiences with them? Is is a good deal? Or just a hassle waiting to happen.
I am thinking if you stick to a quality brand name, from a dealer you’ve dealt with, (as opposed to an eBay seller for example) you probably are OK. But I’ve never bought anything.
Opinions? Thoughts? Any thing to NOT buy?
I’ve alway been of the opinion that I’m not rich so I have no other choice than to by quality things so thay last longer. I’m speaking of appliance and such. I don’t know what you have in mind.
I’ve bought 2 refurbished iPods and it has worked out well for me. IIRC, they were of the “certified” variety.
I’m happy to buy refurbished devices from the manufacturer. It’s covered by the same warranty and verified by the people who know how it’s supposed to work. A single faulty component that gets replaced doesn’t mean that the whole unit is cursed or something.
I have bought a couple of refurbished Tracfones, and my husband has bought one. I remember problems with two of them. The problems were immediately evident. The one my husband bought still had the phonebook entries of the previous owner. I don’t remember what the problem was with the other one, just that it had one. In both instances, a call to customer service was all it took to resolve the problems. And to put things in perspective, I just bought a new Tracfone, and it took THREE calls to customer service to get my old phone number and minutes transferred. Go figure.
I bought a refurbished Dirt Devil product that’s been completely flawless.
I’d carefully check out the warranty and/or refund policies of the seller before committing. But my limited experience has been positive, on the whole.
I was looking on Overstock.com at different things. Mostly electronic things. Nothing big usually under $100.00 refurbished cost
I did notice iPods seemed to be sold in refurbished mode a lot.
My first GPS was refurbished; bought it from Amazon for $300 (when that was half the price of new GPSs). I only replaced it last year because I found a deal on another one with a larger screen that also acts as a hands-free bluetooth phone. That one was refurbished as well: $105.
I bought a refurbished HP/Compaq Presario last year: 3GB RAM, 2.2 GHz Dual-core AMD with all the normal stuff (multi-card reader, firewire, “LightScribe” DVD-R). Came with Vista Home Premium: $424. Works great.
Refurbished is as good as new if it comes with a warranty.
I haven’t bought that many refurbished things, but the few I do own have been fine. I have a refurb cordless phone I bought in 1998 for about half the price of the same model new, and it’s still going strong (finally had to replace the battery last year).
If anything I would tend to look more favorably upon the refurbished items. To my thinking, they have been looked at more carefully than the ones on the assembly lines.
Based on what I’ve seen in my years in the electronics manufacturing industry, I do not buy refurbished electronics.
I do buy rebuilt auto parts like starters and alternators, but they’re more or less meant to be reworked. PC boards aren’t, not anymore, since they’re all surfacemount parts.
I’d buy refurbished items from a business, but not an individual in most cases. I also expect to pay less than the common on sale price of a new item. It needs to be a minimum price reduction of 25% or I get a new one. These refurbished items often have a different warranty that isn’t as good as the new product warranty.
I’d be careful.
We had a cordless phone that was a piece of junk. Now that we have gotten rid of it for a different model, I am seeing the model we had on sale ‘refurbished’ all over the place.
I have a particular application that requires a laptop with a DB9 serial port and a floppy drive. Virtual ports, port replicators and the like will just not work. The only way to import or export data is by floppy, and to communicate with the appliance using the application is on com port one through the DB9 connection.
I bought a factory refurbished IBM Thinkpad A31 that has worked wonderfully.
I bought a refurb celly phone from Verizon, and I haven’t had a speck of trouble with it. It’s one of their regular Motorola phones, right next to the new one on the Verizon pages, but for half the money. No dents or bloodstains, nor any smell of gunsmoke or cigarettes. 
Back when CD players were fairly new, and the five disc models were a fortune, my wife and I bought a refurbished Sony 5-disc model for half price that was refurbished but sold “as is”. It was broken within a year. I have never bought another refurbished product since.
When I bought my house I was totally out of money but needed a vacuum, so I bought a refurbished name-brand one at Big Lots for $60.
It did the job well enough, but as a smoker and dog owner I am pretty sure I over-worked it. I didn’t know how bad it was until I got my NEW vacuum a coupla weeks ago for $350. I do not know if the old vacuum was crappy because it was a refurb or because it was just so cheap. I think it was just cheap.
I buy off-lease computers from Dell all the time, but those aren’t so much refurbs (broken, fixed and resold) as just…used.
I feel OK buying refurbished for non-electronic things. My experience with refurbished electronics, however, hasn’t been good. My most recent example (and the straw that broke the camel’s back): an Onkyo home theater receiver. It just barely outlasted the warranty, then went schizoid on me.
J.
I’ve bought two refurbished laptops directly from Dell with absolutely no problems. I also bought a refurb Sony Clie when PDAs were all the rage, but not from Sony (I forget the store I bought it from; it was a reputable online store). Again, no problem. I have no problems buying something refurb - I agree with someone above who said it feels like it’s been looked over better, and it saves me a few bucks, so why not?
I am not opposed to the idea of buying refurbished. Nothing about my lifestyle requires anything to be the latest or the greatest. However, I have bought exactly two refurbished electronic items, a digital camera and a SONY CD player.
I made both purchases through ebay. Both sellers promised “factory refurbished”, and had good feedback and everything. Neither item worked. I was able to return them, and all was well in the end, but it turned me off buying refurbished electronics.
Laptops may be a special case, since repairing them often means replacing a screen or hard drive with a brand new part, rather than fixing the broken one. But you don’t know what was done to the one you get.