Hewlett Packard Aims to Boost the Secondhand PC Market with the "PCFax" Health Report System

Hewlett Packard has announced a plan to do for used computers what CARFAX did for used cars: provide a verifiable report into whether you're about to buy a bargain or a lemon, thanks to what it is calling "PCFax."

"When buying a used car, dealerships and individual buyers can access each car's particular CARFAX report, detailing the vehicle's usage and maintenance history," HP's Abu Baker, Sal Vasi, Barbara Spitzer, and John Hong explain in an announcement written for IEEE Spectrum. "Armed with this information, dealerships can perform the necessary fixes or upgrades before reselling the car. And individuals can decide whether to trust that vehicle's performance. We at HP realized that, to prevent unnecessary e-waste, we need to collect and make available usage and maintenance data for each laptop, like a CARFAX for used PCs."

The problem of electronic waste is one that isn't going to be solved any time soon. From regular corporate upgrade cycles and consumer demand for the latest-and-greatest, the increasing computational requirements of on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence workloads, and Microsoft's move to block a swathe of perfectly-usable desktops and laptops from upgrading to its Windows 11 operating system while ceasing security updates for Windows 10, the piles of scrapped electronics grow inexorably larger.

One solution to help slow that growth, if nothing else, is to encourage a second-user market for older but still usable devices. It's here that HP hopes to help with "PCFax," a CARFAX-like service that takes data from existing sensors — average and peak operating temperatures, battery capacity and charge cycles, hard drive bad blocks and read errors, flash storage wear, and so on — and presents it to would-be buyers.

The gathered system health data would be written to a locked-off section of the system's solid-state drive, accessible only to authorized firmware components. To support this, HP has developed a "secure telemetry protocol" — which, sadly, relies on endpoint security controller hardware exclusive to HP's business-class devices, meaning that consumer-grade and third-party hardware will likely be locked out of the PCFax service.

"For IT teams within organizations, we hope the PCFax will bring simplicity and give opportunities for optimization," HP's team explains in its announcement. "We also hope that, much as the CARFAX gives people confidence in buying used cars, the PCFax can encourage resale of used PCs. For enterprises and consumers purchasing second-life PCs, it provides detailed visibility into the complete service and support history of each system, including any repairs, upgrades, or performance issues encountered during its initial deployment."

HP has confirmed plans to begin rolling out the features behind PCFax, if not the service itself, starting early 2026. More information is available in HP's announcement on IEEE Spectrum.