Selling on replaced kit

[kuryakin]

Hi there

 

I am interested to see other school's policies/views on selling on replaced equipment, particularly in terms of indemnifying the kit for electrical safety once sold.

 

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

 

Thanks

[Fazza]

To another educational establishment or a business then fine.

 

If you're talking about to your staff or the public then I wouldn't bother as in my experience it's too much hassle. When I worked at a College we sold of the computers with no OS etc. on them as our license with Microsoft wouldn't allow us to sell a PC with it on. They were Sold As Seen with No Software on them and No Support. ALL the staff interpreted this to mean that once they had got the PC home they could bring it back in a weeks time and ask us to put Windows and Office on it and then support it when it went wrong. We ended up issuing everyone with a refund and sold them on to a business instead. We tried to do something nice for the staff but as we should have known, it backfired!

[hardtailstar]

To another educational establishment or a business then fine.

 

If you're talking about to your staff or the public then I wouldn't bother as in my experience it's too much hassle. When I worked at a College we sold of the computers with no OS etc. on them as our license with Microsoft wouldn't allow us to sell a PC with it on. They were Sold As Seen with No Software on them and No Support. ALL the staff interpreted this to mean that once they had got the PC home they could bring it back in a weeks time and ask us to put Windows and Office on it and then support it when it went wrong. We ended up issuing everyone with a refund and sold them on to a business instead. We tried to do something nice for the staff but as we should have known, it backfired!

 

Very similar experience in my last school. Although we had a load of laptops with licences per machine, I wiped them with the discs, installed correct drivers and updates. Staff were told they were sold as seen with a bit of paper with the following:

 

- Laptop specs

- Windows version

- Software/Drivers installed (office not included)

- terms of agreement of buying.

 

The staff would have to sign the paper and we photocopied it so they had a copy too.

 

Weeks after the staff buying them, they kept bringing them in for me to fix their issues and try to install office on them even though it stated that I and the school were not responsible for any maintenance or installations once they had signed the sheet during school hours. I refused to do it within school hours but offered to at my hourly rate.

 

I think 60% of the laptops were returned under a very large red cloud and the other 40% staff had disposed of because they wouldn't pay my hourly rate to get them fixed.

 

So after that the school decided not to sell onto the staff.

 

My current school refuses to sell to staff.

[googlemad]

Don't bother!

 

Instead donate them to your IT classes so they have some kit to disassemble and play around with, or just recycle them with your computer supplier

[geezersoft]

To another educational establishment or a business then fine.

 

If you're talking about to your staff or the public then I wouldn't bother as in my experience it's too much hassle. When I worked at a College we sold of the computers with no OS etc. on them as our license with Microsoft wouldn't allow us to sell a PC with it on. They were Sold As Seen with No Software on them and No Support. ALL the staff interpreted this to mean that once they had got the PC home they could bring it back in a weeks time and ask us to put Windows and Office on it and then support it when it went wrong. We ended up issuing everyone with a refund and sold them on to a business instead. We tried to do something nice for the staff but as we should have known, it backfired!

That is so funny. Ditto. Get some cash back on new hardware or from your WEEE collector.

[Katy]

I think everyone has tried the "sold to staff as seen with no support no software" once (and never again). If they are decent enough spec/condition to actually have a resale value (e.g. the £50 optiplex 745s on ebay - core 2 duo, 2gb ram sort of thing) you can usually get £5-£10 per PC from a decent WEEE collector. We stopped using the bigger companies and now just use a small local one, we even got almost £500 cashback for giving them a rare and sought after HP switch to recycle once.