What about refurbished?
Around here most of my small business clients have switched to primarily buying refurbished desktops as they grow or replace old workstations. When you can buy a Dell Quad-Core I7 w/ 16 GB RAM, 240 GB SSD Drive, dual displayport video, and Windows 10 Pro for under $350 why buy something new? At 8x to 10x the price with only marginal performance increases the business case just isn't there for a new general purpose office computer which is primarily running office, a web browser, and some customer-specific vertical market applications. At that price you just buy a couple of extra so that you have spares on hand and don't worry about the warranty, because if they last the first 30 days then they will probably last years -- and if they don't that's why you buy the spares.
We just throw them on the bench, open them up to make sure that everything is seated, run general diagnostics to make sure that they are good, and do a fresh OS load so that we are at a known starting point -- which is exactly what we do with new computers too so there really isn't any difference in deployment labor costs.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
