Refurbished R580 i5 at Attractive Price

I am a VALUE shopper and need a new laptop for professional mainstream Office work (Word, email, internet), but also want to have the OPTION to also use it for home entertainment. I don't have a probelm with buying refurbished in order to shave some bucks off of the price,. It will be plugged into the wall 95% of the time, and it will occasionally move back and forth from my home. I am nearing 60, I don't want to have a screeen smaller than 15 in. I am not a gamer, not a movie or dedicated Hulu watcher (so far).

I have seen that the REFURBISHED SAMSUNG R580 i5Turbo 4GB RAM, 500 GB HD is sold at $580, BUT only has a 90 day warranty (14 day exchange period).

Similarly, the REFURBISHED Dell 1558 Studio i3, 500 GB, 4 GB RAM is priced at $585, with a one year Dell warranty.

I am trying to keep the price down, figuring I'll need another $200 to buy the Microsoft Office software. I have been to Best Buy and seen the R580 (although they now sell only the i3 version, and that's priced at 725). I wasn't going to buy it because I felt I was paying for BlueRay (which I don't need). But at under 600, no sales tax, I figure it's worth consideration. I think the upcoming new Samsung line of laptops, the SF, etc., will be expensive (they seem to be premium priced laptops).

Would you buy the Samsung R580 i5 at that price,, or do you think I'm taking too much of a risk with it with a 90 day warranty. Maybe play it safer with buying the refurbished Dell i3 for under 600?

THOUGHTS? THANKS!

 

I like the R580 with the i5. See my post on mine.

 

+2 on the Samsung! Very happy with its performance. I've thrown a lot of stuff at it and the fan kicks on and kicks off just right! That tells me Samsung did a great job at keeping this computer from blowing up! It stay 30 degrees below its 200+ degree F max point when both cores stay at 97-100% for 45 minute stretches. Unlike a Dell Inspiron I had that fried to a crisp (literally! The motherboard is just a glob of melted circuits) just by browsing the web!

 

Absolutely. That price for the Samsung is great. I love mine so far.

Plus, I'd bet if you changed your mind within the 90 days, you could sell it to someone else for more money (especially if you loaded microsoft office into it).

 

Thanks for these prompt responses. The seller, a business in DE, offers to buy it back within the 90 day warranty period rather than fix it. I have to clarify what happens if there is a problem 120 days in. Two queries:

Does anyone who does alot of typing on their R580 have a problem with the touchpad....

Does anyone have an understanding of how the REFURBISHED Samsung marketplace works, since Samsung is not a brand that I associate with the big players in the leased business and corporate computer market. The fact that BestBuy only sells the red R580 now in the i3 configuration makes me wonder if Samsung changed the config on the red R580, and now has resold the i5s through jobbers who are offering to the public at reduced prices....any sense of why Samsung would reverse course, sell the i5 through BestBuy last spring, and now the manufacturer seems to have re-marketed as an i3? Any problems with i5 processor (esp. after 90 days )?

 

I wonder if the refurbished stock are machines that got sent back for some reason, have been checked / fixed and are then sold to resellers. 90 days is long enough to reveal any manufacturing defects while most other problems won't appear until after one year. The i5 CPU is likely to out-live the rest of the machine. Most electronic components are very reliable (the Nvidia GPUs of about 3 years ago being a dishonorable exception).

John