Back to school! Maybe...

[ICTDirect_Dave]

Good morning lovely lovely Edugeekers!

 

I hope you all found a little time to rest last week. A week off from schooling two very stubborn children was welcome indeed!

 

With the start of the new half term and the potential announcement later today that all schools will be returning in two weeks, I thought I should ask the following question.

 

How can we help?

 

We've been in full remote working mode recently, providing hundreds of laptops and webcams to those who need them. However, we also have our usual, glorious range of SFF desktops, Mini PCs, quality monitors, servers etc. They're all just begging for a new home...

 

 

Here's a few of our latest arrivals.

 

First up, the HP EliteDesk 800 G2. This has been around for a while now but is coming down in price. You're looking at just £215 for i5, 8GB DDR4, 128GB SSD!

 

 

Next we've a couple of new arrivals.

 

The HP EliteDesk 800 G3 is perfect for power-hungry users and design suites. Packing a beefy i7, 16GB DDR4, 256GB SSD and 2GB dedicated graphics these will plow through the hardest tasks.

 

Sticking with HP we've got a limited number of rather recent EliteDesk 800 G4 SFFs. With 8th Gen 6-core i5 CPUs, 16GB DDR4 & NVMe SSDs these are the most modern desktop we've yet stocked!

 

A few of you have been taking advantage of our (frankly wonderful) server deals of late. If you're looking at a last-minute upgrade then look no further, we've got you covered.

This obscenely powerful Dell R630 has been our bestseller in 2021. Take a look at these lovely specifications...

24 Xeon cores - 48 threads, 256GB DDR4, 4 x 1.6TB NVMe U.2 SSD, 6 x 1.2TB 12G SAS HDD, 1Gb RJ45 AND 10Gb SFP+, 3 years warranty. It's a monster!

 

 

If any of the above has tickled your fancy, or indeed if there's something else that you need, drop us a line, we'll be able to get most things sorted before the 8th no problem at all.

[ICTDirect_Dave]

I neglected to mention monitors yesterday which was silly of me.

We've got a whole bunch of HP EliteDisplay E232 just landed...

 

They're glorious displays. 23" 1920 x 1080 IPS panel, VGA, HDMI, DisplayPort connectors and fully adjustable (height, tilt, swivel) stands.

 

At £75 each with a 3 year warranty they're almost too good to miss!

[saggu]

Got Chromebooks?

[ICTDirect_Dave]

Got Chromebooks?

 

No chromebooks, sorry.

 

Our experience with them is that by and large they're pretty cheaply made in the first place so they're almost always in awful condition by the time they make their way to us.

Due to demand brokers are still trying to get good money for them. Which means we can't afford to buy them and refurbish them to the standard we'd be comfortable selling them at.

[ICTDirect_Dave]

I tell you what... I'm terribly forgetful!

 

Not only did I not mention monitors, but I forgot to mention the stonking great pile* of HP All in Ones that I've got filling a corner of the warehouse!

They're cracking little machines. HP ProOne 400 G2 with 20" widescreen display, 6th Gen 3.7GHz core i3, 8GB DDR4 and 256GB SSD. Yours for just £280!

 

Get em while we've got em!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Not an actual pile, these are well-cared for and boxed up nicely.

[paulkerton]

Our experience with them is that by and large they're pretty cheaply made in the first place so they're almost always in awful condition by the time they make their way to us.

As someone who uses Chromebooks day to day I've found that Acer, HP, Lenovo, Samsung Chromebooks are all pretty well made, and are in excellent condition when we receive them.

I can think of a few maufacturers that aren't well made however, though that also applies to their Windows kit too. Perhaps you're buying A Suss batch...

[ICTDirect_Dave]

As someone who uses Chromebooks day to day I've found that Acer, HP, Lenovo, Samsung Chromebooks are all pretty well made, and are in excellent condition when we receive them.

I can think of a few maufacturers that aren't well made however, though that also applies to their Windows kit too. Perhaps you're buying A Suss batch...

The Top-tier manufacturers do have higher quality chromebooks, for sure. But we've not seen these in more than odd devices here and there.

Used chromebooks haven't shown up in any quantities on the big spreadsheets of ex-lease kit that gets sent our way. That tends to be our problem. If we have to go out to market to buy something specific, we always have to pay considerably more for it than if we get shipping containers full of machines.

 

Business-class laptops such as HP Elitebooks, Dell Latitude 5xxx/7xxx series and Lenovo Thinkpad T/X series are leased in their tens of thousands, meaning there's always a market. So far we're not seeing Chromebooks in quantities of close to even a single percent of that.

 

I do keep asking our purchasing team to keep an eye out for a deal that we could use as a test bed, but so far, nothing

[paulkerton]

Used chromebooks haven't shown up in any quantities on the big spreadsheets of ex-lease kit that gets sent our way. That tends to be our problem. If we have to go out to market to buy something specific, we always have to pay considerably more for it than if we get shipping containers full of machines.

Oh, you're talking about refurbs not new. Sorry! Makes sense now.

 

To be fair to yourselves, used Chromebooks are a false economy. There isn't any margins in those devices for resellers as is (you're talking maybe £1 a device for new machines being sold to schools) so for refurbs there's no chance of getting anything decent in and finding a margin to refurb and resell without the costs exceeding the price of new hardware.

 

And as the biggest market is schools, then they're inevitably going to be bashed around quite a bit if they're coming in for refurb!

[ICTDirect_Dave]

Yep! that's been my problem.

 

There will come a time when we snaffle a great deal of ex-lease chromebooks used for business, but I'm not holding my breath!