Junk or treasure: AnandTech tests Amazon’s cheapest Black Friday desktop PC

Some Black Friday deals are wild. A store might offer only a couple of units of a particular TV, discounted by 66%. There might be a few pieces of a flagship smartphone at your local electronics store at half price. These are designed to entice customers through the door, and if you're brave enough, ensure the cold for up to 12 hours to get that bargain of the year. But one of the key observations about looking at Amazon's Computing and Components section every Black Friday, particularly this year, is that most of the discounts are for complete trash. After the headline external storage discounts, it's just page after page of USB cables and smartphone holders. But one thing did catch my eye: an entire PC, for only 57/$61! How can an entire x86 desktop PC be sold for so little? We did the only thing worth doing: we purchased it. The listing on Amazon is for a refurbished Dell Optiplex 780 - an office form factor machine that is very typical of one you might see in an office that hasn't been updated yet (this is probably where this unit came from). The listing for the machine promises a few things: a CPU at 2.6 GHz, 4 GB of DDR3, a 160 GB HDD, and 802.11abg Wi-Fi, as well as Windows 10. What we received was a 2.93 GHz processor (woohoo!), 2i-2 GB of DDR3, a 250 Gb HDD (woohoo!), no Wi-Fi (boo), and a full copy of Windows 10. The fact that this comes will a full blown copy of Windows 10 Pro, which even at its cheapest is around $20, astounds me. Even if the whole unit is a refurb, that's the one part that is most likely new: and given that the value of the contents are around $30, that only leaves $10 for the actual hardware. Better these old office refurbs get sold on Amazon than dumped on a landfill or torn apart by children inhaling toxic fumes in India. These kinds of machines are great for alternative operating systems like Haiku, too.