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Am I the only one who thinks refurbishing old office PCs into budget rigs is getting harder?
Last month I picked up a pallet of 12 off-lease Dell Optiplex machines from a liquidator in Cleveland for $40 apiece, thinking I'd flip them as basic home office boxes for a quick buck. Back when I started doing this around 2019, you could drop in a cheap SSD, maybe bump the RAM, and have a solid little machine for $150 total. Now I'm pulling these things apart and finding soldered RAM, weird proprietary power connectors, and BIOS locks that take more time than the machine is worth. Two of the dozen had bad caps on the board, and one had a locked firmware password that the seller swore was wiped. I spent almost 3 hours on a single unit just trying to get Windows 11 to install around a missing TPM header. Between the labor and the parts, I'm barely clearing $30 a box, which is not worth my Saturday. Feels like the used market is getting squeezed from both ends with new mini PCs getting so cheap. Has anyone found a sweet spot on which models are still worth flipping, or am I just chasing a dead business at this point?
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