I've got a confession to make.

A while ago I refurbished this old laptop for someone, and ended up installing Bodhi on it. While I was installing it however, I did have some wicked thoughts..

What if I could ensure that the system remains up-to-date by running an updater script in a daily cron job? That may cause the system to go unstable, but at least it'd be up-to-date. Windows Update for Linux.

What if I could ensure that the system remains protected from malware by periodically logging into it and checking up, and siphoning out potential malware code? The network proximity that's required for direct communication could be achieved by offering them free access to one of my VPN servers, in the name of security or something like that. Permanent remote access, in the name of security. I'm not sure if Windows has this.

What if I could ensure that the system remains in good integrity by disabling the user from accessing root privileges, and having them ask me when they want to install a piece of software? That'd make the system quite secure, with the only penetration surface now being kernel exploits. But it'd significantly limit what my target user could do with their own machine.

At the end I ended up discarding all of these thoughts, because it'd be too much work to implement and maintain, and it'd be really non-ethical. I felt filthy from even thinking about these things. But the advantages of something like this - especially automated updates, which are a real issue on my servers where I tend to forget to apply them within a couple of weeks - can't just be disregarded. Perhaps Microsoft is on to something?

Here's my current setup. Needs a bit of improvement still.

A few years back I thought getting two big touchscreens would be amazing to use for making music. I rarely touch them. They get dusty all the time. They are too reflective. The border around them is way too thick. They are too big to be useful in this configuration. I'll be replacing them with normal screens and probably go for a vertical arrangement instead.

As you can see, there's a fair bit of stuff on my desk. There's a USB sound interface that could be rack mounted but I've been too lazy to buy or make anything to house it. I have a pair of headphones, a wireless headset and a Rift hanging off of the microphone stand. I rarely use the microphone and guitar at the moment (considered trying some voice acting, not particularly good at guitar!)

The desk was originally 2 desks from an Internet cafe that was being refurbished. I cut the ends off them and joined them together to make a desk to fit the space I had and stuck some metal legs onto it (used to have a big ugly brown metal frame). Oh and made some holes to add cable grommets and it has an IKEA cable tray underneath.

There's also a slide out music keyboard underneath (made from some bits of wood and a drawer runner, it's quite clunky and I'm tempted to use some rack rails instead).

The drawers were to store stuff from my desk in but I just replaced that stuff with other stuff...

So our university website was recently refurbished with new design. But fucking hell it's bad. Not only the whole website is full of bugs, the design choices are extremely poor.

Sometimes, when I open a course page, it opens a modal with undefined as it's title. And I have to click close button ten times to close the modal.

I can't even blame university. The guy was a former student and Uni probably trusted him. What a retard!

Didn't use windows for over a decade but my refurbished x270 came with it and damn.. They f-ing raped the f outta it. Every action has a kinda lag, nothing is instant. I saw that on my dad's laptop too and thought it was the HD. And why the f can't I smash ctrl+alt+del at boot anymore? It just f-ing ignores. Took a lot of attempts before i found out how to boot from usb. I would not for any $$$ work on windows anymore. Thank God .Net core exists for linux and works great

Just got one refurbished laptop (x220)

Going to install Arch (first time). Let's see how well it goes :-)

How many of you fellas have thinkpads? Bought this refurbished unit about a month ago and the machine is great, really. Very happy with its performance, sturdiness & reliability.
Only thing I'm not too psyched about is the battery life. Probably need a new one as I'm hitting about 4 hours max on a 6cell.

Running Xubuntu 16.04, might switch distros as quite there are a few bugs in the new release but at the same time I don't wanna downgrade to 14.04.

I finally got the refurbished laptop I ordered and..
wrong CPU, wrong number of cores
wrong GPU
only 1 USB port, I bought 3
battery is DOA

fuck aaa_pcs at ebay. they better replace this with what I bought or imma call Karen to talk to their manager

maybe I should check for spyware/backdoors/etc while I'm at it just because I'm pissed.

any suggestions? nothing is too petty if it doesn't void warranty

This is a rant thats been waiting a long time to be said...

About half a year ago I got a refurbished laptop, and decided to run manjaro on it (primarily because I didn't have the time to setup arch). I spent time configuring it, I tried out different things, and all in all I learnt tons about linux, and just random things about computers in general.

I dont regret this in the slightest!

Despite the many times where something went horribly wrong, like after I moved over to efi (without a hitch, actually!) I forgot to add to fstab my esp and f-ed the whole boot system. Or when, right in the beginning of this adventure, I tried to move over Xorg to my nvidia gpu and left optimus on. Big Mistake! But I learnt, and I came out a better sysadmin, a better dev than when I first went in.

And again, I dont regret it in the slightest!

Just married, sold my expensive laptop to pay some debts, and waiting for a very cheap refurbished laptop that I just bought. Can't wait longer!! Need to code something in React!

SO . . . my laptop just decided to no longer be a computer. And while I love boxes that have stickers on them and offer nothing else in terms of functionality, I should probably be able to code. And watch cat videos on YouTube. So . . . anyone ever bought a refurbished computer on Groupon?

I just wanted to develop a cool webapp-controlled lighting for my bar.

Next things I know, there is electronics scattered everywhere, 2 multimeters to find what the fck is wrong with a PSU not outputting 1/100 of the current it's supposed to, said PSU opened on my desk, and I'm trying to find a capacitor online because there isn't any fcking electronics store selling spare parts anymore in my city.

Context:
- PSU means Power Supply Unit, in this case a computer one.
- PSU was given by a friend and is out of warranty
- the total consumption for all LEDs is 24A @ 5V consumption. A refurbished PSU is ideal for that
- that PSU is rated 2A @ 5V on the stand-by, which is perfect to power a Raspberry Pi. The issue is that there is a sharp voltage drop as soon as you try to use more than 20mA.

I bought medion md 19500 vacuum cleaner refurbished for about 74 usd, it can be controlled using ir remote

I disconnected vacuum top and it’s still working so my plan is to use arduino instead of attached remote to control robot

I can try to identify where ir sensor is to directly connect to it, but don’t know if my skills are enough to do it.

edit:
to compare, roomba create 3 costs 450$ and I can buy this vacuum used without remote for 38 usd

I know lots of you like to shit on Apple. Generally I'm with you.. but I need to share something with you.

My Mid-2009 MacBookPro is still kicking.
Sure, over the years I've changed it to SSD, maximized the ram and changed the thermal gel.. although it sounds more like a jet plane than a notebook, it runs latest OS X (not macOS 🙄) and is still great for web development in 2017.
I mean it really runs pretty good for a 8+ years old machine. It really does.

But fuck no I ain't paying Apple ever again. I know FOR SURE once this piece of heavenly garbage is officially dead I'm getting myself a (most probably refurbished) ThinkPad.

Is buying a refurbished MacBook worth the discount? Any significant risks involved?

just receive a refurbished 4 years old laptop.... then deep clean it.... now having dilemma on picking a distro......

mainly use to run data analysis (r, Python, Java, C++, mySQL, MongoDB and some cloud servers...)

my thinking about a good distro to me, comfortable appearances, customize freedom, community support and constant security update.

any suggestion people??

Tl;dr Why would someone preconfigure a hardware raid on a server AND NOT TELL ME?

Recently we got a refurbished server that has some nice specs and works quite well. It had six 2.5 bays and came with two 248gb HDDs. But it only included 2 rails, so we needed more, and we got more.

I installed windows on it (yes, some of the software we use is windows only), and for some odd reason the forth HDD (this was the second one that was pre shipped) wouldn't show up in the disk management, which was odd especially considering the fact that the SAS did detect it, and would get pissed at me if I took it out. I was in a rush so I left it alone for then.

I had needed to setup a raid for these, and while I was trying to figure out what was wrong, I noticed that windows can do a software raid so I set it up on the third HDD (which is the first pre included HDD). I haven't actually used it yet.

At some point I stated to mess with the HDD that wasn't showing up (switching them around, etc.), when I noticed that windows saw the raid was setup on both of the HDDs, which made me wonder what was going on.

So I decided to check the SAS to see if there was something wrong there, as it was booting, bios let me know that there was a raid that was in the process of rebuilding, so then I thought "oh cool, windows actually does a hardware raid!" Well actually it doesn't, as I was looking I saw that this raid was only setup on the two HDDs that were acting funny, and therefore it was only coming up as one device in windows. I wasted an hour trying to find that!

Fucking Linux tho

I started using Linux on a Raspberry Pi with Raspbian mostly accessing it over putty to install packages and running python scripts. I recently installed Debian Stretch with Raspberry Pi Desktop on an old Laptop to program in python because the package manager is so convenient.I really like the experience in using this none bloated os. Wanting to buy a refurbished Thinkpad to use as a daily driver it is really confusing which Distro to pick.
Just stay with Debian or is it worth to check out other distros?

My office uses decade old refurbished optiplexs. One of them even runs win7 32bit (ALL the rest or 64 bit) last night I stayed late to finalize some setup for moving the shared folder from a network shared external drive plugged into one person's computer. Over to a system that'll act as a NAS as well as run some simple automation (nightly backups mostly)

While doing that I remembered one person complaining their computer not always booting right. So I turned it on. Made sure it worked didn't notice any obvious issues. Turned it off. Unplugged it. Opened it up. didn't see any obvious issues so I closed it back up. Tried to turn it back on and it refused. Then I smelled burning electronics. Quickly turned it off unplugged and opened.

I think something shorted and the hard drive finally failed or something. I don't know what exactly it could've been but I threw a fit and left for the day
I'm currently in my way in early to swap that computer out and do some more investigating. Wish me luck talking to my boss less than a month in and something breaks while I'm in the office alone

Hi, please advise me on your best price/quality reseller of supermicro servers, no refurbished, preferrably germany cause they are cheaper compared in belgium...

!rant

I had a Lenovo x260 and it died. Does literally nothing anymore. So, i bought exactly the same (refurbished) and replaced the drive. Ubuntu is in boot options but does nothing, instantly reboots. Does anyone have tips?