DfE Covid device - buy back scheme

[psydii]

We ended up with the Acer Travelmate Bs and I have to say they have been brilliant, we put a light image on them with just essentials such as Office Etc, battery lasts all day reasonably fast.

 

Absolutely. I ended up with an evaluation/pre-production unit very early on (B3 non-Spin), and was blown away by how good it was. We then bought as many as we could with parental fundraising. They have been the best, and from where I learned not all eMMC 5.1 storage is equal. The last batch of Lenovos have been pretty solid so far too.

 

Anything with 2 cores is trash.

[psydii]

Do you guys remember Covid right and how no one could get anything? The laptops were to support students at home yet seems like most of you laughed at the spec and claimed them for classrooms. Get your houses in order before you complain about things.

 

True, but some of the stuff shipped was undeployable. They wouldn't autopilot, and wouldn't take a clean Window 10 install, and if left as shipped, were unusably slow just trying to use a web app, we have many of them still on the shelf, I imagine it is this stock that people are complaining about. We ended up loaning out many of our top-tier classroom photoshop-spec laptops to fill in the gaps.

 

That said, we have not tried to claw back any DfE device shipped to a student, and a great many are still in use (with yr 11 and yr 12 mostly).

[Ironside]

Do you guys remember Covid right and how no one could get anything? The laptops were to support students at home yet seems like most of you laughed at the spec and claimed them for classrooms. Get your houses in order before you complain about things.

 

Your hostility is most unwarranted. Yes, these devices were for students at home, but now that remote learning is not necessary, unless you want us to sell them off or hoy them in a skip, they are going into classrooms or into trolleys. Where else should they be.

 

Additionally, not to be political, but the rollout of the devices was sloppy - Gamarue worms on Geobooks, Geobook screen replacement repairs that cost as much as the original device, non-standard components that differed between laptops of the same model making maintenance a pain, cheap as chips and poor specs which makes longevity and actual practical use limited. Plus the DFE intune setup getting renewed for one year at the last second wasn't great planning.

[Fazza]

We had a mix of HP and Dynabook and they have faired well except pupils took them and never brought them back! Still 45 outstanding from last year...

 

There are plenty of laptop models that were exclusive to the DfE available at CeX so your missing ones might be on there!

[Olliekai]

Wales didn’t get any DfE devices. WG gave us Chromebooks instead. Leadership has wanted them returned to the school for class deployment. Nearly 300 not returned. Probably will be written off.

 

Some seem okay, but we have a load that are easily broken, and so I’m gradually building piles of Chromebooks that don’t work.

 

At least they aren’t laptops, but we are getting a new school soon and they want to have less IT rooms and more Chromebooks.

 

PS. I don’t like Chromebooks.

[DGardiner]

Wales didn’t get any DfE devices. WG gave us Chromebooks instead. Leadership has wanted them returned to the school for class deployment. Nearly 300 not returned. Probably will be written off.

 

Some seem okay, but we have a load that are easily broken, and so I’m gradually building piles of Chromebooks that don’t work.

 

At least they aren’t laptops, but we are getting a new school soon and they want to have less IT rooms and more Chromebooks.

 

PS. I don’t like Chromebooks.

 

Chromebooks are great, Assuming theyre managed be a and limit the domains that can login, and disable anything you cant find in management. we lost single digits on 2400 loaners

[Dos_Box]

Please keep it civil guys, remember many decisions about the deployment of these devices were taken by the school, not by the IT support department. Edited October 5, 2022 by elsiegee40

[DrBeaker]

Please keep it civil guys, remember many decisions about the deployment of these devices were taken by the school, not by the IT support department.

 

Yep unfortunately I suspect many of us weren't alone in very last-minute thinking on that front. I know for one thing I had to think of something in less than 1x hour on a Friday and get it ready for the Monday including priority delivery - in the middle of a pandemic.

 

A lot of DFe devices had 64GB eMMC SSDs that wouldn't fit the Windows image.

[LeMarchand]

A lot of DFe devices had 64GB eMMC SSDs

 

64GB!!! The Dynabooks we got were 32GB .

[MrEprise]

Out of curiosity, did anyone get laptops with AMD CPUs/APUs?

 

We ended up with 6 HP 255 G7s which were meant for specific Students but because a couple of those had alternative arrangements means that we have 2 of them still. The CPU (an A4-9125) has worse performance than the N4020 Celerons in the GeoBooks and they are not supported in Windows 11 so effectively become e-waste when Win10 goes EOL (though yes I know they could have ChromeOS Flex or Linux on them but still.)

 

These definitely seemed like a custom order since the APUs were almost 4 years old at the point we got these laptops and the Intel alternative which was the HP 250 G7 had CPUs (Celeron N4120) which came out in late 2019 so were somewhat better in that regard, especially since all of those are upgradable to Win11.

[Supportafrika]

If you are giving these away please remember us as we can make a use of them.

[rspruijt]

If you're looking to get some value from the DfE devices that your institution no longer needs, I would explore vendor-specific credits like ta.education/acer-stem-rewards/ and ta.education/recycle/ 👍

[Chclark]

Don't get why more people don't make the most of hp trade in. We got £150 back for each device we traded in against a i5 8gb ram 256gb name with hdmi and dp outputs, after trade in these work out about £250-260 a device with 5 year warranty based on pricing we got for our summer deployment.

[junz]

Don't get why more people don't make the most of hp trade in. We got £150 back for each device we traded in against a i5 8gb ram 256gb name with hdmi and dp outputs, after trade in these work out about £250-260 a device with 5 year warranty based on pricing we got for our summer deployment.

Who did you get that from? We have only been offered £100.00 trade in credit.

[Chclark]

From when it launched certain devices where classed as hero devices they sometimes changed in the months these device had extra cashback top-up on them. Luckily the SKU we ordered was one of these our supplier let us know the model which was boosted for when we was putting orders in.

[Cat_Jam148]

Don't get why more people don't make the most of hp trade in. We got £150 back for each device we traded in against a i5 8gb ram 256gb name with hdmi and dp outputs, after trade in these work out about £250-260 a device with 5 year warranty based on pricing we got for our summer deployment.

 

I'm a little wary of that HP trade in programme* - when we explored that route, it turned out the devices were priced higher than they normally would be and the saving was very little when all was considered. Also had to deal with the hassle of claiming the cashback.

 

*I did only check with one supplier, as our usual supplier ended up undercutting the price with a Lenovo machine vs the HP

Edited November 2, 2022 by Cat_Jam148

[Chclark]

I'm a little wary of that HP trade in programme* - when we explored that route, it turned out the devices were priced higher than they normally would be and the saving was very little when all was considered. Also had to deal with the hassle of claiming the cashback.

 

*I did only check with one supplier, as our usual supplier ended up undercutting the price with a Lenovo machine vs the HP

 

Used the trade in several years now never found pcs over priced from suppliers we use and trade in is usually a breeze some years it's more fiddly like boxing each pc up to go back. This year if it's over 10 devices they send someone who will box then all and do it all for you. We have had over 100000 back in cashback this year.

[DrCheese]

I'm a little wary of that HP trade in programme* - when we explored that route, it turned out the devices were priced higher than they normally would be and the saving was very little when all was considered. Also had to deal with the hassle of claiming the cashback.

 

*I did only check with one supplier, as our usual supplier ended up undercutting the price with a Lenovo machine vs the HP

 

Aye what I found as well - Used in it in 2020 & it was a good deal, but in 2021 & 2022 I found that they just slapped the base price up to above what I could get from Dell & then it only came close once the discount was applied (Still lost out as I wanted 16gb in each machine)

Found this year we'd only get £50 per trade in as well, so it became even worse value for us.

[Chclark]

Aye what I found as well - Used in it in 2020 & it was a good deal, but in 2021 & 2022 I found that they just slapped the base price up to above what I could get from Dell & then it only came close once the discount was applied (Still lost out as I wanted 16gb in each machine)

Found this year we'd only get £50 per trade in as well, so it became even worse value for us.

 

 

What suppliers are you using and what machine spec it was only i3 and r3 CPU machines which where lesser cashback. Obviously with our value of order we have to get multiple quotes, even looked at other brands and never found anything coming close to the hp prices we get quoted more so once cashback is factored in.