Buying the refurb

In the techno world, there are (i) the early adopters, who buy the new, expensive stuff first, (ii) the mainstream, that buys it when it has largely been proven and has come down in price and (iii) the laggards, who grab at the previous generation of technology, when it has been cheap or even discarded.

Where am I, in this admittedly crude scale? I'm half mainstream and half laggard. Why? Because I'm frugal. Namely if something will get 25% cheaper in a year, I figure I can usually wait.

And there's one pretty good way to save money on good products. Buy a manufacturer refurbished unit. I've done this many a time and in every case it has worked out wonderfully.
However, I will not buy used stuff, as I have no idea how the previous owner treated it.

I treat things gently. Too gently my wife might say. But I've never had anything break on me during its first 2 years, including laptops, except for Dell LCD monitor. So refurbished goods are pretty solid.

Let me do a reverse chronological summary of my refurb purchases.

Apple

I've become an Apple convert, mostly due to the OS X and the great Intel based Macs. And of course there is no way I'm going to pay $2000 for a Mac, so what's a person to do? Buy a refurb MacBook (13" laptop) and Mac Minis. I've now bought 2 MacBooks and 3 MacMinis. All refurb.

For the laptops, I've spent $849 each time, separated by 9 months, and hence I never get the DVD burner. Once home, it is an easy memory upgrade to 2G for $50. Since I'm upgrading, I almost wish they would give me 512M, since I hate to waste the RAM I'm replacing.

The Mac Mini was my attempt to get the cheapest possible Mac. I think I got two at $429 and one at $499. And two came with a the Leopard upgrade DVD. I got these over the past 18 months and yet, now I don't own any. They make great gifts when someone you know needs a computer. I also pried these guys open (get a super wide metal spatula and it's a piece of cake) and upgraded each of these to 2G of RAM. But I've given them all away. Perhaps I'll get another $429 jobber if the opportunity arises.

Bottom line: an Apple refurb works great and saves you 20-30%. But you have to check the Apple site (bookmark it) somewhat regularly. The hot deals (15" MacBookPros for $1500 or less, or Mini's for under $599) go pretty quickly. Also watch the specs carefully, as some of the older models aren't worth it even if they do look relatively cheap. E.g. a Mini with a single Core, not the Core Duo, isn't worth it, IMHO, when you can get a Core Duo pretty cheaply if you are patient.

Printers

Of the last 4 printers I've bought, 3 were refurbs.

• HP Color Laser Multifunction - $399 refurb. Heck the ink alone costs this much. So far so good. It's a noisy sucker but all color lasers seem have this problem.
• Dell 2100 (?) B/W Laser Multifunction - $199 refurb (?). Had this for the past 3 years and while it's not great, it gets the job done.
• NEC SuperScript 1800 $800. (New) Bought this way back when it was really hard to get a duplex printer for under $1000. Works well but the aging toner cartridge is getting uneven.
• NEC SuperScript 860 $200 refurb. This was the deal, as I saved 50% and this printer was a champ in its day.

iPod

When I finally bought one of these, I wanted a real screen to watch video. I also wanted the cheapest option I could find. The 30G iPod Classic to the rescue. Refurbished. Saved 33%. (Stupid Apple discontinued the 30G and introduced the 160G shortly after I did this, no wonder this promo lasted so long). Of course, I haven't tried to watch a video yet. Once I got over the initial "do I really want to rip all my CD's to the iPod decision?", I love this thing. And I wish I had more space as I'm rapidly filling up the thing. I see a 160G refurb in the my future...

I won't get the following things refurb

• Cameras - I don't know why but this just seems wrong.
  
• TVs - I don't want a refurbished display, as this is largely what you're paying for.
• Stereo equipment - receivers are cheap, so buy new. So are DVD players.

The new world of TV: crystal clear for (almost) free

Television has quietly been undergoing a digital revolution. This slow moving story of 3 years is not really news, but I'm amazed at how few people seem aware of it. In short:

With a halfway decent antenna, you can get crystal clear broadcast TV. For free.

There are two big breakthroughs. Analog to digital and normal to high resolution. I'll cover those later in the article. But let's just say digital = the sharpest picture ever.

The upside:

1. Assuming you get a semi-decent signal, the picture quality is as good as TV gets. That's the beauty of a digital signal. (I need to verify this, but I believe the over the air signals might be slightly better than cable due to greater bandwidth available). Most stations are 720P, which looks utterly fantastic.
   
2. Once you get the setup working, it is free. This translates to $40-$70 a month saved, which is $500-800 a year.
3. You don't have to give business to a cable company, which many people don't care much for.

The downside:

1. You only get broadcast channels (ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, PBS stations) and possibly the CW. This will depend on where you live and the nearby broadcast stations.
2. You have to setup the antenna, which can be non-trivial if you need an outdoor mount.
3. You need a digital or HD tuner. The easiest way to do this is either get a recent TV (last 2 years) or get an HD Tivo.

Let's go over the downsides one by one.

1. If you absolutely need premium channels like ESPN, or the Cooking Channel or Sci-Fi, then you have pay. But consider that the cost of these channels is $400-800 / year.
2. Try a cheap indoor antenna if you live in a major city. Namely, get a set of rabbit ears for $12 and see if they work. If not, then you may have to install an antenna on your roof, which will cost $50-80 + $10 for a mounting kit. It will take some physical work.
3. If you have an old TV and can't afford to buy a new one, consider how much you're spending on the cable/dish bill. Or for $250 (or $200 if you find a sale) but an HD Tivo and it will do the decoding and recording (!) for you. You'll also have to pay the $99 annual subscription fee. Or you can buy a low cost converter box and get a coupon to cover some (most (all?) ?) of the cost. There are many articles including this CNET article and the official government web site . Or do a google search on "digital tv converter coupon".

And finally the other big reason why not having a modern TV is no excuse is that in Feb 2009, all old analog broadcasts will stop. So you need to have an upgrade anyways.

Analog versus digital

The old TV from the past two decades was an analog TV signal, which is a lot like listening to someone in a restaurant. You have to work with what you hear even if it does not make sense. The new broadcasts are digital which means they can encode the broadcast to have redundant information, so if some part of the signal is damaged, the receiver can reconstruct the entire signal. If you've seen a weak digital signal break up, it does so disasterously, as none of the picture can be reconstructed. In such a case, the analog signal would look terrible too, but might be watchable.

The digital broadcasts occur on different frequencies, and your TV equipment uses the notation N.1 or N.2 to be channel N broadcast digitally. E.g. Channel 2.1 carries the same info as Channel 2.

Resolution

The other big advance is higher resolution, commonly called HD for High Definition. We measure resolution in the number of lines from the top to the bottom.

• The original resolution is 480.
  
• The mid level resolution is 720. This is considered HD.
• The highest level resolution is 1080. As of 2008, only Blu-ray and HD DVDs are this resolution. This is also considered HD.
  

There's two other aspects of perceived resolution. An interlaced signal draws every other line, each time you fresh the screen. Namely draw horizontal lines 1, 3, 5, ... 359 and the next time draw lines 2, 4, ... 480. This is hold over from the old days when drawing all 480 lines in one pass was not possible. Think of vacuum tubes in the 1960s. An interlaced signal has an "I" appended. The TV standard is 480I. You can also find 720I and 1080I signals. In some ways an interlaced signal only has half the resolution of a full or progressive signal, which draws every line on every refresh. A "P" suffix means progressive. Thus, you will see 480P, 720P and the holy grail of 1080P.

The other change in modern TV is a change in aspect ratio, namely width versus height ratio. Traditionally, TV has had a 4 to 3 ratio, which is almost square. Movies in the theatre had a 16:9 ratio, which is almost twice as wide as it is tall. This is why if you show a wide-screen movie on TV, you get the black bars on top. Modern LCD, LED and plasma TVs have a 16 x 9 aspect ratio because that's the new HD standard.

Basic (Windows) Computer Setup for Gentle Users

Setting up a computer for a novice, who is likely to be a light user? Say a parent or grandparent. Here's my guidance.

First, I expect them to do only one main thing: use a web browser. This alone lets them do the most important things: lookup information, do email, view multimedia (say family pictures), may play some board games, and perhaps do some minimal online financial accounting. With the advent of online games and online office apps (with Google Apps being the best known example), one can reasonably do pretty much everything in a web browser.

Advise them not to install anything else on their computer. It's simply not worth it.

Physical setup: Set the display resolution so that characters are comfortably visible on the screen. If you have the money, buy a bigger monitor. My mom was much happier with a decent used 20" LCD (1024x768) than with the piece-of-junk 17" Dell LCD (800x600) we got "free" with the computer.

If this is a laptop, get mouse! And get one to their liking in all cases. If possible teach the difference between ths mouse buttons, which maybe a stretch.

Security: This is the big problem as there are no-just-forget-about-it solutions.

First, educate them about (i) forged email identities (perhaps send email to them claiming to be someone else if you have the knowhow), (ii) forged websites, such as a website pretending to be their bank, (iii) phishing email (dig up an example from your own spam folder), and (iv) the expectation of getting constant spam. Teach them opening an email in gmail is OK, but clicking a link is dangerous, even if it is to open an image.

Beat into them the general rule "if a web page or email shows up unexpectedly, assume it is dangerous." If email seems odd as in the person you know doesn't make sense, don't trust it. The corollary is that if you expect to see something, then you can generally trust it.

Malware: All standard AV (anti-virus) and spyware security products are fairly intrusive from a CPU standpoint as they have to monitor data realtime. And they cost money and have to be updated.

Fortunately, Google came to the rescue in the last 2 years. The Google Pack contains a free AV scanner (Norton) and a spyware detector (Spyware Doctor). The great thing about them now is that they don't expire. The Norton scanner has to be run periodically to scan your disk. I suggest doing it every 3-7 days. Fiddle with the spyware software yourself and determine if you want it on continuous monitor, which uses 3-15% of your CPU, or you want this off and could do a batch scan every few days.

For a firewall, use the built in one to XP or Vista. Avoid Zonealarm, which used to be the best out there but has become a disaster. Worse still, a one-off email I used to get rebate from ZoneAlarm (owned by Broderbund at the time) started getting spam! The irony.
Web browser: Firefox 2.x has gotten very slow if you open several tabs and/or if you use various AJAX based sites, such as gmail. It's so bad that many people who used to love Firefox, now swear at it. Fortunately, the latest Firefox 3 releases (beta 5, as I type this), are much better, so much so that I love it again.

Setup a free online email account, such as gmail (or yahoo or hotmail). Note: I'm very partial to Google's gmail.

Show them how to search using a search engine such as Yahoo or say, Google.

Windows setup: Turn off all the fancy styles and UI. They use a good bit of CPU and possibly RAM. Set the UI to be"Classic" so it looks like a Windows 95 or 98 box.

If you get a retail machine, disable as much of the crapware possible. Search the web for links to remove this stuff if you want.

Lastly, tell them to relax and surf the web. They can't hurt the computer.