Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/18/get-a-fully-refurbished-and-ce.html
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Does dell still require proprietary drivers built into their firmware that deny access for installing non-dell versions of Windows/drivers/ or other things?
16MB of memory is so 1995, utterly inadequate. Maybe it’s 16GB? I’m not interested enough to check.
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So, does refurbished mean that they somehow got any persistent malware out of various firmware on the motherboard? How refurbished is the drive? Did they do anything other than mirror the OS to the drive and just box it up?
I got to say, without knowing the details I think of refurbished as being like those little strips of paper they used to put across toilets in motels saying “sanitized for your protection,” when putting on that little strip paper may be the only thing they actually did.
I thought the persistant malware hiding in chipsets was mostly POC’s? Not spotted in the wild.
Anyways, regardless this seems a steep price for what appears to be 8 year old tech.
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True enough, AFIK. I guess my general suspicion of refurbished makes me (more) paranoid. Add the trustworthiness of BoingBoing Store/Stack Social into the mix and I’m downright suspicious.
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You? Skeptical??
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I guess you are trying to ask about SecureBoot? If so, it should be able to disable it. Also, with respect to Linux, even work SecureBoot enabled, there are distros that can be installed with it enabled.
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16MB of memory? Someone is showing their age. As a young IT worker, I remember finding it amusing when oldsters would say kilobytes instead of megabytes. Now that I’m an oldster, I myself not long ago misspoke and said megabytes instead of gigabytes. Doh!
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That’s some thirsty ad copy.
That’s what I say about myself and my trusty innards.
I’m sure they meant GB, but that’s just funny. Also remember, “two” counts as “multiple”.
What – precisely – counts as a “tick”?
Ooo. Free monitor. “this model fires right up out of the box” feels to me like the words of an experienced used car salesman. “This baby was only ever driven to church on alternating Sundays by a 70-year-old agnostic who wasn’t in much of a hurry.”
I notice you don’t mention “games”. That’s not a good sign. I also can’t recall when 1TB of storage space was considered “massive”.
And “Optiplex 7010” sounds like something out of 80s future-fic.
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Well, there are a lot of things I can do…like getting a Xbox to run linux, or turning a beer keg into a smoker for beef jerkey. But this is a simple desktop computer that’s barfed out of the box for useability in the consumer world.
Hey, in 2012, when this computer was released, 1TB of space was pretty massive!
(Not even joking. Dell released this computer in 2012.)
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I’m writing from a Dell laptop with 2,000 times the memory
Is that the windows 8 start menu on the monitor?
Also not even joking, that’s when my work iMac was released. And the company owner/my boss still has it in his head that they are “new”. Mine was one of the last ones they bought, and it was a 2 year old refurb at the time. Half of our computers can no longer have their OS updated, and can’t run the latest version of Photoshop. Since we are losing clients, no new computers for us either, so we have to make due. It’s getting pretty archaic around here.
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A year ago when I worked at university in secretary office there were still using some computers that were running windows XP, with about 512 MB of RAM. Some labs weren’t updated since 25 years and were using really ancient hardware, like computers with Intel 80286 processors (it was mostly due to custom software and hardware which nobody wanted to update due to lack of funding). The students were seriously confused about 5.25 inch floppy disks and what to do with them 
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Easy: Treat them with fear and respect. The data stay there only by habit. Still pretty impressive to still find working disks…
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It wasn’t so easy for the students - they seriously had no idea how to insert the disk into a floppy drive. I don’t blame them though, computers were way older than them.
You have my sympathy on the old hardware for scientific labs; I know a lot of it is still out there since that $2MM electron magic device is still completely functional and returns good results, even though it has to be tied to a 16 mhz 286 IBM PC running code that someone wrote in an afternoon that won’t run on anything other than the exact model it was written on, but no one knows exactly what all it does so it can’t be replaced by a computationally superior toaster. 
I just hope it’s all air-gapped to the internet…
(And I bet they have a stack of those computers stashed away in closets and storage rooms to raid for parts when something breaks because good luck telling whoever controls the money that they need a new device which costs $2MM because a 25-year-old computer broke…)
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A friend of ours recently gave us an old computer he used to use for business that he still had sitting around. It runs Windows XP in 256MB of RAM. I wasn’t aware that Windows XP would actually run in only 256MB of RAM, but it does. I was sort of impressed.
Being a pack rat, I still have the DOS 5 + Win3.1 5-1/4" floppies (and some other software on 5-1/4" floppies) from my first computer in 1992. The floppy drive itself is installed in another computer and still works fine.
Tough crowd about that Dell. Conspicuously missing from the specs is any mention of how beefy its power supply is. The main problem with it is that you could get that same refurbished computer (minus the display) for hundreds of dollars less by shopping around.
(Edit: oops)
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