[ok123456]

Is there any value added here?

Carfax exists because of the possibility of buying a car with extensive damage that looks cosmetically ok. Additionally, the service records they collect indicate that a vehicle has undergone regular maintenance.

Computers, for the most part, aren't getting in major accidents and reentering the stream of commerce. Additionally, there's no significant mechanical maintenance required, except for blowing compressed air if the environment is dirty.

[A4ET8a8uTh0_v2]

This, I think, is the part that confuses me. While there is a level of uncertainty, when buying used computer, the cost tends to magnitude smaller than a new car and even for fancish lappies likely sub 1k ( maybe that changes when we start accounting for gaming laptops, but those are unlikely to be corporate fleet, which I assume is the consideration here? ).

I initially though HP found some new way to fleece data out of its users, but looking at what is proposed, I don't see anything that obviously bad so I am lost here too.

And this is all before we get to how difficult HP has gotten to repair. My last HP ( consumer grade after which I swore no personal HP machines ever ) did everything short of soldering hdd to the board ( ridiculous placement, non-standard screws ).

The idea has some, limited merit, but I just don't see it being useful.

[cosmic_cheese]

There’s plenty of models of business notebooks and thin and lights, many of which are preferred by a certain customer segment over cheaper options due to higher grade design, materials, etc that can breach the $1k mark in the used market if sold within the first year or two of manufacture.

I don’t know how much value it’d add, though it would be pretty interesting to see exactly how much of a Ship of Theseus that used laptop you just bought is, if this system tracks part serials and such. Could also be useful for sniffing out use of substandard/knockoff third party parts, which could be of legitimate interest to buyers (I wouldn’t necessarily trust a third party power handling module from AliExpress for example).

[lawlessone]

smaller consequences too.

There are lots of ways a dodgy car could kill me or someone else.

[n8cpdx]

I was wondering the other day about something like this for retro computing hardware, including game consoles.

You can buy a device that looks perfectly good, but has rusty parts, leaking capacitors, shoddy/counterfeit replacement parts, and who knows what else. And if it wasn’t previously opened (they seemingly always are), you don’t know what was done to it.

I don’t think you can really solve that through tech, it’s really more of a record keeping issue. Which actually seems to be mostly how carfax works?

I’ve thought about fixing up consoles and selling them (more for cost recovery and to free up space than for profit), but I wonder about how to share information about the work and the risks in a way that the purchaser is likely to understand and appreciate.

[kmoser]

AFAIK, at least some repairs done by non-dealers are never reported to Carfax, making it prone to false negatives.

[khedoros1]

Maintenance too. There was about a decade that I took my car to the repair place within walking distance of home for regular maintenance (oil, brakes, shocks, tires, etc). I took it somewhere else after moving, and they asked if I really hadn't done any maintenance in the past 10 years.

[venusenvy47]

I had some body work performed on my car, and the shop had a sign that explained that they don't report to Carfax.

[fred_is_fred]

The other purpose of a CarFax is to validate or attempt to validate that the mileage reported is accurate or not. Is there an equivalent of mileage for a CPU or motherboard?

[bigfatkitten]

BIOS on Panasonic Toughbooks reports total power-on hours. This is independent of the HDD/SSD’s SMART reported runtime.

You can view this as a normal user, but it can’t be reset by mortals.

[ok123456]

People aren't forging SMART drive diagnostics. These are <$100 components anyway.

[kube-system]

SMART stats are cleared on secondhand or "refurbished" drives quite frequently

e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42864788