refurbishing old computers and selling them as a profit for a school project

[fireflash93]

hi there, I am a year 12 student in Australia, and for my school project, I am looking at purchasing an old computer and refurbishing it into a gaming computer. I plan to do this by adding a graphics card and increasing the RAM. currently, I have not yet purchased any components as I am still researching. so far, I have researched what each computer part does and how it affects gaming and how to plan, build and create the computer. what I'm not sure about is anything to do with the selling or buying of the computer components, I have looked at purchasing stuff on mainly facebook marketplace and gumtree. is there anything I should look out for or anything that would be helpful to know when purchasing and eventually selling the computer?

[Levent]

Check to see if stuff is actually getting sold. Market is very saturated imo.

[12345678]

besides being a very saturated, platforms like marketplace, ebay, amazon and so on have shit ruling regarding copyright

 

In other words, there are sellers who abuse the copyright system to ban competitors. and unless you have really old accounts, or you like document forgery... good luck at getting back in the platform

[FlyingPotato_is_taken]

Buy low, sell at market rates. That's the only way to make a decent hourly earning in this market.

 

Getting PC parts on a budget is the challenge.

[jaslion]

Also well specs?

 

If its just too old you wont make money off of it simply put

[manikyath]

it's a horrid market to be in. margins are razor thin, competition is fierce, and if you have any sense of honor in your body you'll lose to the most ruthless of scammers out-competing you.

 

a place i used to work at did this on the side, we were our own source for old computers so we essentially had no purchase cost past a pile of kingston A400 SSD's, and even then we were lucky to sell our own inventory at some sense of profit before they got too old to even bother selling.

[Tan3l6]

Refurbishing older or actually any time period PCs as mentioned is not profitable.

Except if you have audience that buys above market price.

[artuc]

You can buy refurbished older gen OEM PCs (Dell, HP, Lenovo etc) for really low prices including Windows. Some even have been upgraded with SSDs.

 

By the time you factor in your own time and effort it just isn't worth it at the budget end.

 

Also adding a GPU can actually be tricky as if you are scraping the bottom of the barrel for a base build many may not work due to PSU being underspecced and/or lacking connectors, cases lacking space, motherboard slots and so on.

 

Generally low power and/or small or low profile cards can work but mid to high end cards can be a problem.

 

My pitch is can you do something charitable like If say you were sorting PCs or IT for community groups and things like that. Switch in an SSD for them, install and setup a WAP or so on.

 

I'd imagine the profitable side for gaming builds would be bespoke high end custom builds where you can deliver to a really high standard and there is enough meat on the bone you can actually come away with a profit.

 

Conversely need more liquid cash to float that.

 

Although that is just speculation on my part but seems to track with the mindset of some people that want the 'best' at the higher end and throw wads of cash at it regardless of arguments that it's not needed.

[Brian McKee]

A better project is refurbing a really old computer into a daily-able office system and donating it. Even stuff from the Core 2 era is very capable.

 

In my opinion refurbishing for "profit" really isn't a thing with regular computers since the barrier to entry is just so low. It can kind of exist for laptops and individual components like GPUs/CPUs but you need to be able to accept loss and have some skills.