Diagnose
It arrived. It looks fine. You have fourteen days to find out.
A refurbished machine is sold on a grade, not a measurement. The parts that fail first are the ones nobody photographs: the fan, the paste, the cooling. Those only show themselves under load, and you have a return window.
What the report tells you
Three figures, each with its reading.
Settled level
%
What it still holds after minutes of load. A refurbished machine that keeps most of its opening speed has working cooling; one that does not has a job waiting for it.
Decay
%
How far it falls. Under about 5% is unremarkable. Past 15% on a machine that should not be doing that is your evidence for a return conversation.
Two runs, back to back
compare
Run it twice with a short gap. The second run starts warm, which is the condition a tired cooler fails in, and the difference between the two is often the whole story.
The diagnosis
The shape of the curve, read for your case.
01Holds steady
The cooling works. Whatever else you check, this machine is not hiding a thermal problem, which is the expensive one to discover in month three.
02A steady slide, worse on the second run
Dried thermal paste or a fan full of dust: the exact things a light refurbishment skips. Cheap to fix, but decide who is paying while you still can.
03Drops hard and stays down
Something is wrong beyond servicing, or the machine is far more limited than the listing implied. Do not spend the return window hoping.
Every class comes with a stated confidence and the measurement’s own noise floor. How the shape is read
Where a browser stops
What it cannot tell you.
- No battery health, and on a used machine this matters as much as anything here. Read the cycle count from the machine's own battery report before the window closes.
- No drive hours and no SMART data. A drive with five years on it is invisible to a web page; check it with a proper tool.
- No screen, hinge, keyboard or port condition, and no proof of the serial. This is one check among several, not the whole inspection.
Which run
Deep, 8 minutes.
You are inside a return window, and the fault you are looking for takes minutes of heat to appear. Take the eight minutes; a three-minute run can miss exactly the machine you would want to send back.
Both kinds are free. The choice is on the set-up screen.
Questions
Asked in these words.
- What should I check first on a refurbished laptop?
- In this order: that it holds its performance under sustained load, the battery cycle count, the drive's SMART hours, and then the physical items you can see. The first two are the expensive ones to get wrong and the ones a listing is least likely to describe honestly.
- The seller said it was tested. Is that enough?
- It depends entirely on what was tested. Most refurbishment testing confirms that a machine boots, that the ports work and that the drive is wiped. Almost none of it holds the processor at full load for three minutes, which is the only way tired cooling shows up.
- It slows down but the listing said grade A. What now?
- Grades describe cosmetics, not thermals, and an immaculate chassis says nothing about the paste under it. A measured curve is a concrete thing to put in front of a seller, and most reputable refurbishers would rather service it than take a return.