HP Refurbished Spectre/Envy/etc. any good?

I've had good luck in the past with Dell refurbished products but have never tried HP. Anyone have any good/bad experience with refurbished HP notebooks?

The DELL refurbs ive gotten had 1 year next day on site service which is actually better than new for most of their products... but HP has a 90 day warranty and instead of selling refurbished products directly they seem to offload them to microcenter and various online retailers, amazon resellers, etc.

 

Have you checked HP's Outlet? I believe they are also available there with better service options. Also make sure to check Lenovo/Dell Outlets for any good deals.

 

I've had a poor experience with brand new HP's let alone refurbished ones. The only one which worked well was an old DV6 with an AMD APU. I would say Dell are better simply because of their customer support and warranty.

 

I'm back to swearing off dell... they are great but when they are bad they are monumentally bad. I had a $2500 xps 27 that the bios bricked on due to some conflict between dell, intel and Windows 10 software... after dell had approved the machine for windows 10. Their solution was buy a new mother board and install windows 8. Of course they stopped selling the motherboard due to the same flaw so their next solution was drop another few thousand on a new one which 'works fine'. To which I thought... until it doesn't. Previous to that machine I hadn't bought a dell in decades after a support person transferred me to a phone sex line instead of a supervisor to escalate my problem. So dell is pretty much out.

I have an HP gaming desktop (4770k, etc.) that I picked up used a couple years back and never had any problems with it. I had a spectre x360 13" which I didn't have any problems with except wanting a bigger screen.... but they used to make some flaky stuff.

I check lenovos outlet fairly regularly... but was more wondering about what a 'refurbished' unit is form HP, quality, etc.

 

For the record, i've not had much luck with Dell either. My old XPS developed an issue where the GPU seems to get worse and worse over time - crashing constantly unless you underclock it to the point of uselessness. Dell of course won't fix that, even though its clearly either their or nVidia's fault for a flawed design. I would only recommend Dell if you get something at a very low price with a good warranty. Really, I wouldn't want to recommend any BGA crap nowadays - all of them will fail eventually - but sadly there is not really any choice unless you go for something really high end (Clevo). The lower end BGA stuff though (especially with integrated graphics) is reliable enough that you don't need to worry about it for a long time. That is why I usually recommend desktops to people.

HP's refurbished laptops are probably similar to everyone else's, and you are probably right that they have improved since the old days. I still wouldn't buy one - but they are probably no worse than any other crapbooks you can get.

 

I hear you. I've actually been buying used for the past few years... while intel was on their 10% improvement per year schedule the allure of 'shiny new' kept a steady supply of quite capable machines rolling through craigslist. Picked up my HP gaming desktop for $350 and sold the monitor for $75. So $275 for a 4770k, 16gb, 256gb/2tb, gtx760... for $275. I also have a thinkpad t560 and yoga 260 that I picked up for a fraction of new from a company that went under. But I'm shopping for a 2-in-1, touch+pen with i7-8550u and NVidia graphics... they haven't been around long enough for the used market and the performance boost is to big to go with the previous generation... and new gives me sticker shock. lol. I just go through machines to frequently to spend that much every time. lol. I develop for a living so tend to switch out hardware often.

So... with HP releasing their 2018 spectres, discounting the late 2017 spectres (first version with 8550u)... and discounted refurbs of the late 2017 spectre. The prices start to get reasonable in the refurbs.

 

If you need something portable, those U class CPUs are the way to go imo. They are so low powered that they likely won't fail anytime soon. Its the dedicated GPUs that like to stop working.

I agree, buying used is a good idea, you can get way more for your money similar to used cars. This laptop was used - for 350 quid I couldn't get anywhere near this performance buying new.

 

Yes, the 8th gen U series chips give a great portability/performance/power combination. I spend about 1/2 my time off grid (4kw solar so not kinda on my own grid)... so power is a very real issue. I need an NVidia GPU for rendering, quad core for my development work, etc. the mx150 is fine for light rendering and with thunderbolt 3 I can hook up a desktop card for the occasional big stuff.

There aren't to many i7-8550u+thunderbolt3+mx150 machines out there and they aren't cheap. Seriously... PC makers should be throwing thunderbolt 3 in everything... the external gpu/docking market would become the 'new desktop'. But they haven't got that bright idea yet.