I feel like a lot of major urban centers have "that" store whose entire business model is collecting electronics from failing businesses and then selling that. Great way to get a bunch of extremely underpowered Windows laptops or Android tablets. Terrible computing devices in general but if you're lucky it'll work well enough.
Allegro is full of refurb mini PCs, mostly Dells. It is complete computer for less than $100 [0], like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40697831 says, it is very hard to beat it in terms of value.
That said it is much harder to get nice notebook/tablet, the wear and tear is very visible on screens/keyboards.
[0] to my surprise the one I grabbed had an internal mono speaker(not beeper) somewhere in the case.
