Worth upgrading computers to sell

I have been seeing dual cores selling for around $100. ea. up here on C L.

You start to price yourself out of the market if you raise the price to much...........You can get a brand new desktop for around $400 at walmart.........Probably cheaper if you found one on sell........I would put the least possible into them however what will sell them quickly is 4gb memory.......I try to always put 4 gb into my desktops and they do pretty well....I would put 4gb and at at least 160gb hard drive into them and let em rip tater chip

dont' know if this will help

http://knoxville.craigslist.org/sys/4206164364.html

dell optiplex 755 towers

http://southbend.craigslist.org/sys/4187650066.html

Originally Posted by Rollyrogers33

Where do yo find cheap hard drives?

Check with parttimescrapper. He is a buyer here that buys, tests and sells hard drives. He can give you a great straight up deal without the e-bay fees.

I took a crack at the refurbishing side. I may do it again, but it will be with higher grade computers. I started with 10 HP Pentium D computers that I got for $15 each. No hard drives and 1 gb of RAM. When these computers were pulled from service, they were all working and had 80gb hard drives and XP on them. I had a couple of hard drives laying around that were good already, but needed 8 more. I made a call and got them at a good price.

For this experiment, I decided to keep them as originally sold. We installed 80gb hard drives into each and loaded them with XP. They were offered for sale with power cord, keyboard and mouse. Since I have little experience with reloading an operating system, I took on a partner in the task. A local kid that is in college for computers that already refurbs computers for resale to pay his bills. He is someone that I have dealt with for a bit buying burned up boards and swapping working for non working parts, etc. He had the disks and know how to do these things fast. I had 4 stations set up in the garage, so we could do 4 at a time. It takes about an hour or so to get a machine up and running from scratch. he had a disk that contained all kinds of drivers that he could just pop in and it would detect and install everything after the OS was installed. That saved a bunch of time as well.

This type of machine does have some use. Someone looking for a cheap computer with no whistles, buzzers and bells for a child, or grandma and grandpa for e-mail and Skype, there are many reasons to have a less than recent version of a computer. There are lots of people that don't have a music library or download video that can still use these computers that have a fresh install with no bloatware or viruses.

Long story short, I know, too late, I still have 4 of these setting here and the price is now at $50 each. I am still seeing some interest in them, so the price will not go down anymore. We sold one or two at each price level as we came down in price to find the key price point.

When listing these type of units on Craig's list, don't be afraid to double list it. Once in the computers for sale section, and again in the barter section.

Our best turn over in this endeavor came from the listing in the barter section. A guy called and we chatted about what he had and we ended up trading a netbook of some sort that worked fine (sold on E-bay for about $100 (cleared $82 after all fees and shipping)), and a computer that had a problem. The problem with this computer was that the owner had tried to pull out the heat sink and clean it. When he did that, the heat sink compound pulled the chip out with it and when he tried to reinsert it, a couple of pins bent and he gave up on it. That second computer worked after we straightened out the pins and then it failed after a couple of days use. However, the CPU was still good as well as the 8gb of DDR3 RAM and the 1 terabyte hard drive.

So, you can make some decent money from older systems with things such as only 1gb of RAM, and an 80gb hard drive.

However, you will certainly make more from a system that has more RAM and a higher value hard drive.

As far as video cards go, in my opinion, a special video card does not mean as much to people as the RAM and hard drive numbers. One may be better off pulling a nice video card and selling separately, and letting the motherboard handle the video.

Sorry for the ramble. Hope some of this helps.

I loaded XP because that is what the machine was licensed for already.

the only problem that I could see is that xp support ends in april and boxes with xp will slowly stop selling if the general public goes on to their website. win 7 is the best way to go since most people have no clue of other os's. just my 2 cents

Originally Posted by tski72

the only problem that I could see is that xp support ends in april and boxes with xp will slowly stop selling if the general public goes on to their website. win 7 is the best way to go since most people have no clue of other os's. just my 2 cents

Oh, I agree. Windows 7 is better, but these machines did not have a license for that OS. I probably won't be messing with anymore XP machines. But the parts are still good for testing and selling.