Cisco switches at ERA Calgary?

[snoop101]

Good morning all

So I been looking to pick up a couple of Cisco switches from Kijiji for CCNA exam. One thing I noticed is that there seemed to be a lot of switches with the same background. I looked into it more and they are all being sold by ERA Calgary. Has anyone bought from them before?

I guess that's how they make their money by picking up used equipment then selling them on Kijiji.

I'll throw this out there too, if anyone has 1-2 older switches for sale let me know.

[G-ZUS]

Originally posted by snoop101
Good morning all

So I been looking to pick up a couple of Cisco switches from Kijiji for CCNA exam. One thing I noticed is that there seemed to be a lot of switches with the same background. I looked into it more and they are all being sold by ERA Calgary. Has anyone bought from them before?

I guess that's how they make their money by picking up used equipment then selling them on Kijiji.

I'll throw this out there too, if anyone has 1-2 older switches for sale let me know.

bought from them before, sh!tty overall experience. Won't deal with them again.

[GoChris]

Bought a couple HBA cards from there a few months back, easily got a big discount for buying two.

[nzwasp]

what do you need, I have a couple of 2950s and a 3550 that I bought from there. However I suggest you use packet tracer and gns3 instead of hardware.

[Thaco]

They're shady that for sure, shitty experience, and typically don't even have what they have listed on kijiji, they just put stuff on there to get you in and then try to sell you other stuff, they never remove old ads, just like shady used car dealers.

[syscal]

I have quite a few routers here. 871w, 1811, 1811w, 861w, PIX501. PM me if you're interested.

[UndrgroundRider]

Originally posted by snoop101
I looked into it more and they are all being sold by ERA Calgary. Has anyone bought from them before?

I buy from them all the time. As long as you know what you're in for it's not a bad deal. Usually you can get items for way less than even used market prices. The trade-off is that at least 30% of their items are defective in some way (but they do offer refund/exchanges within 7 days). Keep in mind, they are an electronics recycling place after all. There's a good reason people have thrown out the hardware in the first place.

Anyway, if you want something from them then the easiest way is to buy it on ebay (http://myworld.ebay.ca/calgarycomputerwholesale/), select local pickup and then drive down. They have an ipad in the front room for ebay pickups. Just put in your ebay username and they will bring your order out. Don't bother with printing a kijiji ad off, there's probably less than a 10% chance they still have it. They're really not setup for any other order method.

In terms of hardware quality it's hit or miss. They're reselling equipment that people have decided to recycle. Usually they just do a power on test and that's it. So if your device has an intermittent problem or something not obvious with a simple power on test then you're getting faulty hardware. Ironically you're actually better off going with older hardware since the likelihood is much higher that it's not broken and someone simply phased it out.

[snoop101]

Originally posted by nzwasp
what do you need, I have a couple of 2950s and a 3550 that I bought from there. However I suggest you use packet tracer and gns3 instead of hardware.

I have touched on gns3 a bit, but I feel that having physical hardware might be best. The advantage I see with gns3 is that I can do it from work or home.

If you are thinking of getting rid of the 2950's pm with your price for the two and I may just pick them up for at home to study with.

[eblend]

Cisco packet tracer will have everything you need for CCNA, without having to mess around with downloading IOS files for GNS and all that. I used it for my CCNA

[ZenOps]

I've got an ancient 3200 gathering dust. Vfxweb sometimes gets a few in.

[calgaryrecycling]

For anyone interested in shopping at ERA all the inventory is available online at https://greencomputers.era.ca or on ebay.

The prices are low, and allow everyone access to low cost equipment. All items come with 30 day warranty, or longer in certain situations.

Schools, Daycares, Elderly Homes, Charities, and all kinds of non profit and social institutions and organizations get the items at no charge.

Individuals can volunteer some of their time at ERA and earn any of the items available on the store.

[Zero102]

I've dealt with them before - also a very negative experience, people working there couldn't tell the difference between DDR2 and DDR3 memory or read the stickers to tell 1GB from 2GB meaning it took about 45 minutes to track down a stick of ram that they only needed to find because a computer was listed incorrectly (listed as coming with 4GB of memory, only had 2GB installed). Like the others have said, old kijiji ads draw you in there but of course those items have already sold. I have found recently their pricing is not very competitive, while a year or two back it used to be. I have personally observed some very shady sales practices while I was there picking up other things as well, jacking prices up on a guy because he wanted to go home and talk to his wife before spending money for example.

After all that, by far the most annoying thing about them, is that Bodan keeps sending me invitations to connect with him in linkedin