Re. Death by a thousand (budget) cuts
I have heard of poor companies who send their minions on eBay raids.
Old RAM sticks are actually *more* reliable than new sometimes, depending on what they came out of.
Also a lot of the time they can run at their rated clock speed whereas newer ones auto-negotiate to whatever the speed of the CPU/BIOS/uEFI default which can result in issues.
Also relevant: many old laptops have socketed CPUs so can be upgraded if you have enough of them and a little assembly line of PFY's taking them apart with military precision and then running the final soak test en masse with a CPU fan clean/replacement included via drawing lots.
(note: with mine I needed to reflash the BIOS but this was a 2 minute job)
Batteries can be reconditioned with the right procedure and I make extensive use of BatteryInfoView (tm) and similar tools for a quick go/no go test.
The really rubbish one(s) get given away to folks as an alternative to being mains tethered with the advice to be really careful with backups, sometimes they last a few months to a year.
Used but tested SSDs are normally OK for many applications and everything gets backed up to encrypted SD card with a boot alert if it gets taken out.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
