best cheap/free scores 1.1

[dmill89]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

My precision m6400 is that way; 4 slots, 2 under the bottom cover 2 under the keyboard.

My precision M4600 and M4800 are the same way as well, but it is easier to pull the keyboard on the W520 (just 2 long screws removed from the bottom of the laptop vs. having to pull the click-fit keyboard bezel to access the screws on the Precisions) which is why I used it for the pics. Though Dell did a better job of how the slots are laid out with the slots on the bottom and the slots under the keyboard both being split between the 2 channels and the bottom slots being the primary so if you only have 2 sticks of ram there is no need to pull the Keyboard, while the Lenovo has one channel under the keyboard and one under the bottom slots (and slot 1 of channel A under the keyboard must be populated first so you have to pull the keyboard regardless of ram configuration).

[Hondaman]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

I always say I get very little of the "good cheap/free scores" compared to other badcaps members, and here is another example.

My neighbor dumped a "clamshell" Dell tower computer on the side of his house. The glossy Microsoft Windows sticker is worn off, and the Dell Asset Tag doesn't give me all the characters. It has a WD Raptor 3.5-inch half height 74 GB SATA 150 (first generation) spinning hard drive (28200 hours, 3250 start/stop cycles). Crystal DiskMark gives this drive a yellow CAUTION warning.

It also has a Toshiba/Samsung SD-616 "DVD Master" DVD-ROM unit, manufactured April 2004.

It also has a TEAC DV-W58E-045 DVD-R/RW unit, manufactured April 2004. I think the number 45 is the hardware revision number.

Interesting -- both optical drives are IDE, but the hard drive is SATA (Dell probably HAD to spend the money for an 80-pin IDE cable because of the throughput of the optical drives). The hard drive has a manufacturing date of 24 April 2004. Isn't this around the time spinner drives quit displaying the exact date they were made? And isn't this around the time PC makers switched from IDE to SATA?

The hard drive had about 1 GB of audio files (Nirvana, Def Leppard, various artists) that were dated mid-2012 to mid-2013, but no documents or spreadsheets or photos. It was used for little else, it seems. And probably not used recently. I found an installer file for Flash player 11, 32-bit, so it was likely a 32-bit CPU. Looks like 2 "NANYA" modules of 184-pin RAM, 512 megs each, PC-3200 speed.

The Sound card is model SB0350, a PCI Audigy 2. Corrosion on the board, don't expect it to work. Video appears to be Radeon 9800XT, AGP, with a fan that needs oil and a decent amount of corrosion on the board. Don't expect this to work either.

Since the glossy Windows COA sticker was not legible, I couldn't tell what version of Windows it had (and I don't know what files to look for on the hard drive). The case is quite rusty on the bottom, and the basement of their house has seen water. When I plugged in the keyboard, mouse and monitor and hit the power button, the fans spun but there was no single-beep to indicate a successful boot, and my monitor did not wake up. Even the casing of the optical drives shows corruption and rust, and there is much dust on the case's air intake areas.

The mainboard takes a 20-pin connector from the power supply (with a 4-pin plug located somewhere else). The PSU is very long and short, just a couple of inches all along the bottom of the case. Proprietary form factor. It uses two 60mm fans (in a side-by-side configuration, of course). Plenty of rust on the metal fan grates here.

I'll keep the Raptor and the optical drives, and probably the memory. The rest will probably go back to the side of the neighbor's house, or maybe to the county's recycling center, which is FREE for computer equipment.

(NOTE: 3-5 years ago my neighbor dumped a system that still had 533 MHz RAM in it. I think it was only 128 megs. It might be mentioned in this thread. This neighbor was on welfare, rather poor, and lost the house to foreclosure on August 9, 2022. I'm not sure when the Sheriff will show up and evict them and change the locks, but the new neighbors will have LOTS of work to fix up the house, inside and out. TRUST ME.)

[Dan81]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Classy dumpster score of the week, an ASUS A7V8X R2.0 (the one w/ a blue PCI slot), Athlon XP 1700+ (AXDA1700DLT3C, T-Bred), 2x 256MB worth of Kingmax RAM (which has always been reliable to me, at least on the DDR400 side of things), a Titan cooler I had to refurbish (the original fan shattered into pieces while I was cleaning it, thankfully I had a similar one that works).

Board might need a extensive recap (the only caps I replaced currently are about 5x 3300uF 6.3v KZGs that were bad. The rest of the board is full of OST RLS, as well as about 5x Rubycon ZL 1500uF 6.3v.

Not sure what was causing it not to POST for a long time yesterday (it hanged during BIOS setup, and would fail POST with just two speaker clicks and nothing else, regardless whether I had GPU, RAM or neither.) as I just tested it as of now and it POST'd successfully w/ a 512MB Kingston KVR stick and a Palit Daytona MX440 8x 64MB.

And as RJARRRPCGP once said, these are some absolutely tougher-than-nails motherboards. ASUS really wanted this mobo to last through the sands of times. (not that my P2B Rev1.02 is any different in this regard, lmao)

[diif]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Since the glossy Windows COA sticker was not legible, I couldn't tell what version of Windows it had (and I don't know what files to look for on the hard drive).

You don't need to see the sticker, just open the Run box (Windows key + R) and type winver.
You can use Magical Jellybean to find the key. https://www.magicaljellybean.com/keyfinder/

[j.caps]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Well my best score would eb the current PC im using a Dell Precision T5820 with a Xeon W2125 and 64GB Ram. two were disposed, this one had a botched bios update. the other one idk mother problem, maybe. no idea. It had Quadro M4000 but it didnt work. I think it was the mos expensive card I scrape. im currently using a Quadro K600

[stj]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

The hard drive has a manufacturing date of 24 April 2004. Isn't this around the time spinner drives quit displaying the exact date they were made?

WD always prints the date of manufacture,
the warranty is based on it.
good if you lost the reciept (they dont care)
bad if you buy old stock from a shop that has low turnover.

the Raptor is a great drive btw, i use one on my dev system
you cant do dev work on SSD - the constant churn of tiny files the compiler generates will fuck SSD's real fast.
specially the quad-layer or worse style ones.

[dmill89]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

i use one on my dev system
you cant do dev work on SSD - the constant churn of tiny files the compiler generates will fuck SSD's real fast.
specially the quad-layer or worse style ones.

Unless you have almost no free space so it has to write the same cells over and over again, with wear leveling on modern drives it will likely take a long time to hit the endurance limits (generally in the hundreds of terabytes) on any half-decent drive writing a bunch of small files. We've used SSDs in all the laptops at work since 2015 (including the ones used by developers, and lab systems), and SSD failures are very rare (much lower than when we were using HDDs) with a 4 year replacement cycle on the equipment.

We even transitioned our entire data center to SSDs (of course enterprise-grade ones made for data center use with much higher endurance limits than consumer models) several years ago without any major issues (though there is of course lots of redundancy as well), the power savings alone over mechanical HDDs (generally 15k rpm SAS drives running 24/7) justify the increased initial cost of the drives, and the increased performance is a nice bonus.

[Hondaman]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

You don't need to see the sticker

The machine won't boot. I can examine the files in the Windows directory by plugging the drive into a Windows or Linux box. On the net, there's a list somewhere of which version of Windows (starting with 95 I think) has what file dates on the core OS files.

EDIT: It may also be possible to examine the file properties (in my Win7 machine's file manager) to see an internal version number of some of the core files on this "mystery drive". I think this feature uses the "new executable" header first implemented in MS-DOS 6. (<-- I'm old.)

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Crystal DiskMark gives this drive a yellow CAUTION warning.

this usually indicates the drive has some bad sectors on it according to the smart chip on the drive. u can keep the hard drive if u want as a memento but i dont think u should be storing any important files on it tho...

Interesting -- both optical drives are IDE, but the hard drive is SATA (Dell probably HAD to spend the money for an 80-pin IDE cable because of the throughput of the optical drives). The hard drive has a manufacturing date of 24 April 2004. Isn't this around the time spinner drives quit displaying the exact date they were made? And isn't this around the time PC makers switched from IDE to SATA?

yes but most mobos being made still had two ide ports and only 2-4 sata ports. cd and dvd drive speeds dont saturate the ide bus (22x dvd write speed is still like only 30MB/s and that still doesnt saturate the ata100/133 ide bus) so sata optical drives dont improve performance from a performance and speed standpoint so optical drives continued to be made with ide connectors for some time.

The hard drive had about 1 GB of audio files (Nirvana, Def Leppard, various artists) that were dated mid-2012 to mid-2013, but no documents or spreadsheets or photos. It was used for little else, it seems.

yea funny how someone buys a kickass computer with a kickass hard drive, video card, sound card but only uses it for mp3 ripping and music listening lol! i will never understand some people...

The Sound card is model SB0350, a PCI Audigy 2. Corrosion on the board, don't expect it to work. Video appears to be Radeon 9800XT, AGP, with a fan that needs oil and a decent amount of corrosion on the board.

oi, dont junk those and dont ass-u-me they arent working until u get someone to test them. the 9800xt was a flagship video card for its time and the sound blaster audigy 2 too. the 9800xt is worth a tidy sum on junkbay.

i think u better send the rest of the hardware u arent keeping to someone like topcat to see if he can fix it or see what isnt really working and should be scrapped. i also wonder what cpu is under the heatsink there and what model mobo is it also? if the choice of parts were any indication, im not surprised to see a pentium 4 extreme edition or athlon 64 fx cpu which are both worth a very neat and tidy sum on junkbay so srsly dont toss those!

[stj]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

it's amazing how much people pay for some old stuff now!
i cant even remember how many AT-slot soundblaster 2.0 and pro cards i chucked years ago!!

[dmill89]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

it's amazing how much people pay for some old stuff now!
i cant even remember how many AT-slot soundblaster 2.0 and pro cards i chucked years ago!!

Yep, and I remember 10-15 years ago when the local PC shops (most have long since closed) literally had crates full of that stuff (that they pulled out of old systems people either didn't want to repair or dropped off for recycling) for next to nothing (often a dollar or two for sound/video cards and ~$5-10 for complete motherboards with CPU and RAM).

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

This neighbor was on welfare, rather poor, and lost the house to foreclosure on August 9, 2022. I'm not sure when the Sheriff will show up and evict them and change the locks, but the new neighbors will have LOTS of work to fix up the house, inside and out. TRUST ME.)

Makes me suspicious about greed! Looks much like the same kind of bullshit as in the late-Bush era! That era was known as "foreclosure-city"!

[Dan81]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Lots of scores:

- Acer Extensa 5220 - kinda crippled Santa Rosa-GL machine (a bit similar to my Vaio NR11) but I figure it would make for a great Vista Business lappy. I always wanted to try it so might as well.

- Gateway NV5425u - another GL machine (GL40) but at least this one caps the RAM at 4GB (unlike 3GB on the 960) and no 1066FSB CPUs (something I can perfectly live with, a C2D T6400 will do just as fine over a P7350.)

- Compaq CQ61 - needs new USB ports and cleaning. Came with a Sempron M120 and 3GB worth of DDR2.

- Acer Aspire 5530 - HD3200 variant, smashed screen is its only issue. No charger and HDD (and I have my reasons to believe there won't be RAM either.) but I do have all of those anyways.

- ASUS F8Sv - neat 14 incher, seems like an interesting competitor of the HP dv2900 SE I have. 8600M GT in MXM format, T7500 (though it does allow Penryns after a BIOS update.), 4GB of DDR2.

Had to replace the HDDs in the Gateway and ASUS. Both were WD Blues, both were failing. So to put it short, these might just be the new KZGs of harddrives. Seagates would be KZJ/KZE, in my opinion.

[dmill89]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

A Dell Optiplex 5060 with a "bad motherboard". The only thing actually bad was the CMOS battery, one CR2032 later and it works fine.

Specs:
CPU: Intel I5-8500
RAM: 16GB DDR4 2133
ODD: DVD-RW
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GT1030
HDD/SSD: none/removed, I added a $20 256GB Silicon-Power A60
NVMe SSD (man have SSDs gotten cheap, I wouldn't trust this drive for anything "mission critical" but it is fine for the use of this system).
OS: Ubuntu Linux 22.04 LTS (it also has a Windows 10 Pro license, but I'm using this to replace my old Optiplex 790 dedicated Linux box).

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Do these not POST if the CMOS battery is dead? I remember some Acer systems that would do that.

[dmill89]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Do these not POST if the CMOS battery is dead? I remember some Acer systems that would do that.

They're "weird", they do eventually POST, but they appear to power up and down several times with no display and it takes a few minutes before they finally POST, so to someone who doesn't know any better it would appear "broken" with just a quick power on test.

[Dan81]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

AFAIK the only Acers I know of that will flat out refuse to POST with a dead battery are Wistron made.

I can't even count the amount of laptops people trashed because of that stupid issue. Yes, it's THAT high.

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

They're "weird", they do eventually POST, but they appear to power up and down several times with no display and it takes a few minutes before they finally POST, so to someone who doesn't know any better it would appear "broken" with just a quick power on test.

Yup, HP's do this too....first power up, the UEFI does its 'whats in me number' with the CPU & RAM, etc......and will do a few reboots before POST'ing....easy mistake for the layman to make I suppose. I've acquired a few this way.

[ratdude747]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

They're "weird", they do eventually POST, but they appear to power up and down several times with no display and it takes a few minutes before they finally POST, so to someone who doesn't know any better it would appear "broken" with just a quick power on test.

This is getting in the weeds, but good old ATI chipsets (like for Socket 478 P4's) were also known for not POSTing when the CMOS battery is toast.

[brethin]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Asus old-school stuff would have issues posting with a dead cmos battery.