Thanks and hello to NC! Gorgeous country out there
I am subscribed to
DGS Auction Listings in California, and I peruse them frequently. More important for me is to watch grant listings for the state agencies, typically if you see a grant or budget item to refresh hardware, older great will start flowing in the system soon afterwards. That said the competition for both scrap and use gear is very high here in California - so that drives the prices up significantly.
On the memory and hard drives, the stock Panasonic parts were not what I was looking for - maybe if the liquidation house was lazy and left the HDD in the caddies I'd buy them, but the drives at less than 500GB I have no interest in. My builds are going for 1-2TB HDDs, and those were not an option for the CF-30's, and remain a rare option for municipal machines in the current CF-31 model (just public data security risk alone, having 1TB of data stored on the machine would make me paranoid of machine theft). The memory I'm installing is capitalizing on the capabilities of the CF-30 chipset that was not a published spec of the Toughbooks, the chipset
supports 8GB of system memory, while the CF-30 which was release in a 32-bit OS world only ever
advertised 4GB max system memory possible - so again I'm installing memory that was never an option for these machines.
I've paid a bit of a what you might call a "premium" on a few machines since they were in great shape for a vehicle outfitter who did updates as part of a contract and included most of the optional stuff I was going to install - but really $75 for a machine that originally cost $2000+ is not much of a premium... The machines are expected to have the backlit rubberized keyboards, a fully functional and calibratable touchscreen, the battery in good shape, functioning audio, all of the heaters, DVD-multi drive, pen/stylus, WiFi+BT with the dual RF docking connector, the power pack, all of the connector covers in good shape. After all of the machines are set up that way, I rip them apart and replace the CCFL backlight with a high brightness (1200NIT) LED backlight, reflash the BIOS with a custom ROM I've made for them, install an 802.11ac card, multi-constellation GNSS receiver, and add a few other things that I won't disclose. Very soon, I'll be tearing them all apart and repainting them in Tan CARC with Black CARC details. You'd be surprised (or maybe not) how expensive it can get to take a machine that lacks some of the options up to the spec I've laid out - there is also a lot of troubleshooting time and parts procurement for machines that were found to have problems (the ones that get auctioned often have a reason for being there).