This, I think, is the part that confuses me. While there is a level of uncertainty, when buying used computer, the cost tends to magnitude smaller than a new car and even for fancish lappies likely sub 1k ( maybe that changes when we start accounting for gaming laptops, but those are unlikely to be corporate fleet, which I assume is the consideration here? ).

I initially though HP found some new way to fleece data out of its users, but looking at what is proposed, I don't see anything that obviously bad so I am lost here too.

And this is all before we get to how difficult HP has gotten to repair. My last HP ( consumer grade after which I swore no personal HP machines ever ) did everything short of soldering hdd to the board ( ridiculous placement, non-standard screws ).

The idea has some, limited merit, but I just don't see it being useful.

I was wondering the other day about something like this for retro computing hardware, including game consoles.

You can buy a device that looks perfectly good, but has rusty parts, leaking capacitors, shoddy/counterfeit replacement parts, and who knows what else. And if it wasn’t previously opened (they seemingly always are), you don’t know what was done to it.

I don’t think you can really solve that through tech, it’s really more of a record keeping issue. Which actually seems to be mostly how carfax works?

I’ve thought about fixing up consoles and selling them (more for cost recovery and to free up space than for profit), but I wonder about how to share information about the work and the risks in a way that the purchaser is likely to understand and appreciate.

AFAIK, at least some repairs done by non-dealers are never reported to Carfax, making it prone to false negatives.

The other purpose of a CarFax is to validate or attempt to validate that the mileage reported is accurate or not. Is there an equivalent of mileage for a CPU or motherboard?