how to know the spare part is new or a senond-hand one?

[gary_35]

my box is sth wrong and should be change a hardware,one hp agent say that they can afford the spare part,and i wanna know how can i know the spare part is new and good ,or a senond-hand one

[S.K. Chan]

You can't actually tell. By examining the part (by the way what specific part are you talking about?) and how it was packaged might give you that comfort feeling (if you see that it looks new, no scratches, etc). You just have to install it (depending on what part) to find out if it's working or not. Another possible way to tell if it's new or not is by it's serial number but that does not mean anything unless you know how the serial numbers are assigned according to the manufacturing date.

[Michael Tully]

The packaging may be a dead give-away, depending on the source. If it has been in "remarketed", it is second hand, but sold with the same warranty and maintenance as a new one.

If it is under maintenance, does it really matter?

[Rainer von Bongartz · Accepted solution]

You might try this link:

https://partsdirect.hp.com/epdo/Warranty/View_Warranty_Verification.asp

Enter your serial number and part number and you will see the warranty information for the part.

This might give you a hint if the part is old or new.

Regards
Rainer

[doug hosking]

You might also consider whether it's bad to have a second-hand part. For non-mechanical parts, it may actually be BETTER to get a used part, since it has presumably been burned in long enough to weed out any infant mortality problems. Of course, new or used, you would want to do appropriate checks for correct functioning.

[paul courry]

Uh, Doug....

It doesn't make it back to HP for refurbishment unless it died in someone else's machine first.

[doug hosking]

Paul, I don't know the specifics of the refurbished parts program, but would think there would be a number of reasons a part might be sent back for refurbishing.

For example, when debugging a hardware problem someone might try replacing one part, only to find that the problem still exists, then replace another part and find that was the bad part. What do you do with the first part? It's not bad, but is no longer new either.

Another possibility is that the vendor found a firmware bug with the part and ordered all the parts in stock to be upgraded. The part isn't broken in any way that's not fully fixable by reflashing or replacing the chip that holds the firmware. It may well be cheaper to upgrade all the parts in bulk instead of one at a time in the field.

I'm sure there are other reasons why a perfectly good part gets slightly used.

But much of this probably isn't even relevant. Given the manufacturing cost of many parts on today's systems, and the labor cost of troubleshooting, fixing and restocking defective parts, I suspect it is often far cheaper to just discard bad parts instead of sending them back for refurbishing. I'm sure there are exceptions to this, but it's probably becoming more true every day that replacing is cheaper than fixing.

I really don't worry a lot about this in any case. It's not in HP's best interests to risk its reputation or waste the time of its support people by knowingly putting junk into the supply line.