About 18 months, Stella needed a new desktop computer. Seeking to be frugal, while still delivering performance, and minimizing the footprint on her desk, I settled upon a refurbished Lenovo ThinkStation P360 Tiny.
Specifications:
- CPU: i7-12700T
- GPU: nVidia T1000
- Memory: 32GB RAM
- Storage: 2TB NVMe SSD
- OS: Windows 11Pro
For under $800, this little wonder was a really nice solution for her. It delivered quite a leap in performance from her old system. She makes considerable use to the Adobe Creative Suite, so a dedicated GPU is a real advantage.
However, there was an error in shipping and we ended up receiving a unit with only one 16 GB SODIMM of memory installed. I didn’t catch this fact right away. It wasn’t until some months later when I noticed the system was struggling with some tasks in the Adobe Suite that I found it was memory constrained.
Rather that argue with the reseller about an old order, I just bought a 32 GB memory kit and upgraded the system. I thought it best to use a matched pair of memory sticks. That left me with the original 16 GB DDR5 5600 SODIMM floating around in my junk drawer. It was in a protective case, but not actually deployed.
Some months passed. I’ve recently become aware that the prices of memory and storage have skyrocketed! So much so that it’s impacted the used computer market. Companies in the business of refurbishing and reselling computers are finding the corporate systems that they would start with now arrive with both memory and storage removed!
Given the price of these items, the fact that they must be replaced makes it more difficult to offer refurbished systems at acceptable prices.
This has inspired me to scrounge through my junk drawer to see what I had on-hand that could be rehomed. DDR4 and DDR5 are definitely in demand. DDR3 much less so. It only took an hour or two for that 16 GB stick of DDR5 to get snapped up by someone on E-bay.
There was a time when I would have bought a refurbished system with a modest amount of storage, and upgrade the unit myself after-the-fact. Storage prices at present make that impractical. In 2023, I bought a 4TB M.2 2280 NVMe Internal SSD, PCIe 4.0 Gen 4×4, for $205. A similar SSD today sells for $440!