RFID signalling to stimulate reuse of personal computers

A major obstacle to second hand use of computers is a lack of faith among buyers in the quality of the hardware. In the absence of a means for sellers to communicate system quality to buyers, the true value of second hand systems cannot be verified. This leads to sellers of quality goods having to accept a price which is less than the value of the system. Owners of high quality systems will be unwilling to sell for this lower price, and the market becomes flooded with lower quality merchandise, further reducing buyer confidence in the second-hand market, and so on. Although system integrity can be verified through testing of hardware, this is a time-intensive process, requiring significant technical awareness on the part of the individual consumer, and would be prohibitively costly to carry out on a large scale in a commercial environment.