| All were bought used, all are over a year in service since purchase, and the first failure was this past weekend. That one was the unit which had the most severe service; carried around daily, used everywhere under all temp ranges, etc. It was bought as a refurb with an extended warranty, and will go back to the supplier today. To keep the user up and running, I acquired another used unit of the same exact model on Sunday for under $300, swapped the hard drives, and had the user back up and running in minutes, with no migration of data or installation of apps to deal with. Buying a model that already exists in large number of identical units has its benefits; a year down the road, you can often find a backup of the same model for peanuts used, and thus be ready for quick recovery from a failure of anything but the hard drive. And, if you periodically update the backup so that it's in synch with the runner, you can even recover from a hard drive failure with very little pain. |
