The purpose of this thread is for Digital Home members to review and relay their experience buying consumers electronics at Factory Direct.

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Although I have never personally bought any item from Factory Direct, my business partner seems frequent them more than I like.

He has bought bluetooth headsets, MP3 players, and computers among other things from them. All have failed after a few months of usage. I especially hate it when he bought an used desktop for the office. It came with on the OS license on the case but I had to reinstall the OS from scratch. This is not the problem, but it does take time to get it up and running with all the proper updates and patches. For the price there are lots of other computer refurb retailers that have better deals and less hassle.

You cannot blame FD for the failure of the products they sell- they don't make them nor remanufacture them. You can blame them for poor customer service. Any retail operation that doesn't stand behind their product or trust their customers is one to avoid. Their return policy is poor. Their overall customer service is poor.

Also, you have to be very careful about what you buy. While there can be good deals, there are also a lot of not so good.

Definitely... they do sell a lot of what they call "class C" merchandise, which is basically the bottom of the barrel (ie. LCD displays with dead pixels, hard drives that have many bad sectors, physical defects, etc).

I used to deal with one of FD's main suppliers of refurb/used/clearance merchandise and got to know what FD was being supplied with pretty well.

Even the fully functional stuff may not be a good deal as it's close to regular retail price. Know your prices before buying there.