[TriLUG] Comments on "IBM Certified Used" equipment?

James Brigman jbrigman at nc.rr.com
Mon Feb 28 22:38:18 EST 2005


Andrew;
Generally, IBM equipment is solid. I've worked with it off and on for
over a decade and never run into anything I'd say is prone to failure.
(In the same way that, say, an e-machines power supply or ABIT KT-style
motherboards are prone to failure!) Just make sure:

	- that the RAM is standard DDR
	- that it uses easily upgradeable IDE drives
	- find out what the video slot is, if it's AGP or not
	- if it's got enough drive bays
	- Goto the IBM website to make sure you can download
	fresh BIOS for it, see what current limitations are.
	- surf ebay for your NetVista's model number to get
	an accurate, market driven idea of the value of the machine

Any P4 NetVista is going to be plenty fast and modern enough for windows
or Linux. At that point it comes down to price. I sure wouldn't pay
anything more than $300 for a used computer, and maybe much less
depending on how well it fit the mission criteria. (I admit I do not
know what your criteria is.)

All the mfr's went through a phase where they tried to make the hardware
fairly proprietary. Dell did it with those disappointing GX1p's, which
use an "almost standard" power supply connection, different enough to
prevent expanding the box very much at all. They still do it where they
have to, for various bookshelf-style systems, but things have gotten
much, much better than they once were!

JKB

On Mon, 2005-02-28 at 21:57 -0500, Andrew Perrin wrote:
> Any comments on the wisdom of buying IBM Certified Used equipment?
> Specifically, a couple of P4-grade PC's (NetVista).  How used is it likely
> to be? This is definitely not mission-critical, but would like it to be
> reasonably reliable.
> 
> Thanks,
> Andy
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
> Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
> clists at perrin.socsci.unc.edu * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu
> 




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