Want to start an eBay business selling PCs? (1 Viewer)

[ManW_TheUncool]

Haha... This reminds me back when I was regularly bargain-hunting for old, used (sometimes even very beat-up) violins/violas (and even a very hard to ship cello) off eBay a dozen or so years ago and refurbishing them for my growing family to use -- and I actually resold (or gave away) an occasional one too. I collected so many instruments (and refurbishing gadgets/tools) that my family started to think I was gonna run my own violin shop out of our house, LOL.

That was fun... and yeah, a bit addictive, haha...

I'm actually a hardcore-ish computer guy (and actually went to a top uni for that field back in the day), but interestingly, never got the itch to do this sorta thing w/ computers (or any other tech stuff) though. I mean... I've resold a few tech items along the way (and made a little bit of $ doing so) and, of course, helped a handful of family/friends/acquaintances w/ their computing needs, but nothing like this though...

_Man_

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

I once worked at a company on Hamilton Avenue in San Jose that was a small defense contractor. When they moved on the buildings were taken over by a startup called eBay. It's as though I'm being haunted by the ghost of my old company.

After my years at Intel I still refer to processors by internal names, e.g. these Dells have a Coffee Lake processor.

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

This is like a gambling addiction. I just bought another one, this time for $68 on eBay. Same thing, seller says no ram or disk, "and no video comes out the ports".

It arrived today. As I suspected, I put in a SODIMM and turned it on. It passed all the tests, and I then quickly installed Win 10 Pro. The "micro" is an interesting packaging design.

Cost for a decent Win 11 machine:
$68 used 5060 micro
$17 used 8GB DDR4 SODIMM
$21 new-pulled 256GB NVMe SSD
$17 new 90W AC adaptor
$5 new WiFi antenna

So for $128 (plus shipping and sales tax) I got a very powerful Win 11 machine.

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

So far I've bought 6 PCs to run Win 11. I have two clones for regular use with one as a backup. That left 4 that I really didn't need. I gave three to friends but today decided to use the last one as a HT PC. See my post in that forum.

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

Dang.
I gotta stop going by eBay.
I won an auction today for 3 Optiplex 3060 micros for $200. That's $66 each. I'm going to fit them out cheaply. They come with 8GB RAM but no disk or WiFi.

Optiplex 3060 Micro $66
External PS $10
Used WD Black 500GB disk $10
External WiFi dongle $10

Total cost $96 for a decent Windows 11 machine.

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

They all checked out OK. I want to call out a great eBay supplier of used disk drives: harddrivesonly . See https://www.ebay.com/itm/185308822055 A pair of used drives came in at 4K and 6K power-on hours. These were the premium WD Black 500GB 2.5" drives. They were newer than my used Dell PCs. He wants $10 each shipped.

A friend who is a mac guy bought one from me. He has his late father's trust to deal with, and turbotax trust version is only available on the PC. So he needs a contemporary PC to use once a year. He was really happy to pick one up for around $100 with a full Win 11 Pro license. For another $20 I put in an almost new SK Hynix NVMe SSD for him at his request as he was paying.