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Whenever possible, I buy refurbished PCs rather than new ones-- and it's what I recommend to all my friends. Unfortunately, the word "refurbished" is loaded with bad connotations -- used, damaged, unreliable -- that can make items so labeled unattractive to many buyers. But it's my experience that at least with personal computers, refurbished often means better than new, because retailers or manufacturers are selling something at a loss they never want to see again. Returned once is one time too many. Twice or thrice is simply unacceptable.

I got my first tip off about the benefits of refurbished in the late 1990s when visiting a Sony repair store then located in Beltsville, Md. I observed a number of PCs and asked about them. One of the clerks explained that the shop was one of just a couple clearinghouses refurbishing Sony PCs. I expressed my disbelief in refurbished as being any good. But he explained that Sony didn't want to ever see the PCs again. His job was to make sure the refurbished PCs left in perfect working order.

The reasoning made sense. The refurbished PC has passed the burn through period. Whatever went wrong has gone wrong and been fixed. There is even less risk of problems with a rightly refurbished PC than a new one. It made enough sense to me that I bought my first refurb -- a dual-processor Dell workstation -- in 1998, saving about 40 percent off the cost of a new model. In February 1999, I bought a refurbished PowerBook G3 from PC Connection. The retailer made a mistake, that, thankfully, it didn't want to fix. I purchased a 233MHz model but received instead the 266MHz PowerBook. In 2001, I sold both computers, which ran flawlessly until retirement (PowerBook) and theft (Dell workstation). Since, I've mostly purchased refurbished PCs.

DailyRotation has the Editorial HERE!