The three shapes a desktop comes in
All-in-one
The whole computer lives behind the screen. One power lead, no tower under the desk, and it looks like a monitor when it is switched off.
Small form factor
A tower shrunk down to about the size of a shoebox. It sits on the desk or behind the monitor, takes a normal screen and keyboard, and is far easier to work on than an all-in-one. Ex-corporate offices are full of these, because they fit under a hot desk.
For most people in a flat this is the sensible middle: small enough to live with, big enough to open up when it needs a bigger drive.
Full tower
Room inside for more drives, more memory and a proper graphics card. The right answer if you are building toward something — gaming, video work, a machine you intend to keep upgrading for years.
The honest warning is that a tower is not a thing you carry home on a train, and in this suburb a lot of people are on foot or coming off a train at Perth, McIver or Elizabeth Quay. Ring us before you settle on one and we will work out the practical side.
Where the machines come from
Perth is an office suburb. Central Park, QV1, Brookfield Place and the towers along St Georges Terrace turn over their computer fleets every few years, and the machines that come out are typically three or four years old and have spent their life on a desk in an air-conditioned room.
That is good hardware. Business desktops are specified to run all day for years and built so parts can be swapped rather than binned. A machine like that, with a new SSD and enough memory in it, will do everything a household or a small office actually asks of a computer.
It is a very different thing to a cheap home computer that has been thrashed for five years. The source matters, and this suburb has a good one on its doorstep.
What we do to a machine before it is sold
Every computer goes across the bench before it goes anywhere near a customer.
It gets opened and cleaned out. Fans and cooling get looked at — heat is what kills an older desktop, and dust is what causes the heat. Worn or failing parts are replaced. The drive is wiped properly, not just reset, and the operating system goes on fresh.
If the storage is small or still a spinning hard drive, it gets an SSD, because nothing else makes as much difference to how an older computer feels. If the memory is tight for what the machine will be doing, it gets more.
Then the whole machine is tested as a machine, and it goes out with 90 days warranty. More on SSD and memory upgrades
What it costs and what is in
Stock changes week to week, and so does price. We do not publish a list because it would be wrong by Friday.
What we will do is tell you what is on the bench when you ring, what suits the job, and what it costs — as a firm quote, within 24 hours. Nothing starts until you have agreed it, and most jobs are finished in two to three days.
Which one should you actually buy?
Tell us what the computer is for and the answer usually picks itself.
Email, browsing, banking, streaming, documents
Almost any refurbished desktop will do this comfortably. Buy on size and on the screen, not on specifications.
Study or office work with a lot of tabs and documents open
Memory matters more than processor speed here. This is the most common job we fit a machine to.
A small business with several desks
Matching machines are worth more than the fastest machines. Same model across the office means one set of spares and one thing to learn. Refurbished business computers
Games
An ex-office desktop was never built for it, but a lot of them can take a graphics card. Whether that is a good idea depends on the machine, and sometimes the honest answer is to build something instead. Refurbished gaming PCs in Perth
Heavy video, large 3D work, current-generation machine learning
Refurbished is the wrong tool. We will say so rather than sell you something that will annoy you for two years.
The warranty
90 days on every refurbished computer we sell. If a hardware fault turns up inside that window, bring it back and we deal with it. The same 90 days applies to hardware repairs and to any part we fit.
We are in Bayswater, a short run from the city, which is the part that makes a warranty worth having — you can actually get the machine back to us. What the warranty covers in detail
Trading the old one in
If you are replacing a machine, the old one does not have to go in a cupboard. Bring it in and it can count toward what you are buying. We will look at it and tell you what it is worth. Device trade-in
Where we sell
Perth, and the suburbs around it — Northbridge, East Perth, West Perth, Highgate, Mount Lawley, Leederville, Subiaco, South Perth, Victoria Park and Maylands. See all service areas
Talk to us about a computer
Tell us what it is for and roughly what you want to spend. We will tell you what suits and what is in. Firm quote within 24 hours, 90 days warranty, Monday to Friday 10am to 4pm.
Looking for a portable machine instead? Start on the refurbished laptops page.