best cheap/free scores 1.1

[Agent24]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

I got a vintage oscilloscope for free! It is a ci-112a, a russian unit made in 1992. There is info about it here:

http://oldradio.tesla.hu/szetszedtem...2a/c1-112a.htm

It is mono channel 20MHZ or 10MHZ I am not sure about that.

What do you think?

Looks pretty neat, similar to the Tektronix Dave Jones got recently that doubles as a DMM.

[StahlMaster]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Last month I found a Google Nexus 7 on the side of the road. It had a broken screen and digitizer. I replaced the screen and bezel with a new one ($119) and it works like new. Was made in July of 2013.

[StahlMaster]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

My brother gave me an old (2006) Apple Macbook Pro 1,2 he found in a house he was selling. It had a broken screen. I replaced it for $89.00. I'm posting this message with it!
I'll add the other 1GB of RAM and put in a 500GB HDD. I'm running Snow Leopard.

[whitenight639]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

I recently found a small Pc, at work in the scrap metal bay, (I work in refuse and recycling business) specs:

intel i3
120 ssd -sata 3
4gb sodim ram module :-)

[ratdude747]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Scored some stuff today:

(it was half-off day at the goodwill stores today)

-$5- BFG BFG550WGSPSU "550W" (peak ) PSU... dead, squeals on soft-on. I saw some bloated teapos... and from what I saw through fan, it looked wimpy for a 550W (hence why the "peak" added must be a liberal "peak"). It's a half-bridge (as it has a 115/230 switch). The fan wasn't turning well, so either the fan cooked or the 5V is having issues (or both). I'm out of town, so when I get home I'll tear it down and give it a thread in the PSU forum... for now, I attached a few pics.

-$1.50- TI TI-86 Graphing calculator. Old... but aside from the TI-89 series, it's the only other TI calc that could do vector math nativly... I already have a TI-89 Titanium for college, but I figured it would be a good spare. The issue with it: The screen seemed dead... turns out the issue was that the thing was set to the lowest contrast setting... bumped it to half, works fine.

[shadow]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

-$1.50- TI TI-86 Graphing calculator. Old... but aside from the TI-89 series, it's the only other TI calc that could do vector math nativly... I already have a TI-89 Titanium for college, but I figured it would be a good spare. The issue with it: The screen seemed dead... turns out the issue was that the thing was set to the lowest contrast setting... bumped it to half, works fine.

At my school and university we were only allowed to use calculators up to the Ti 83+ (mainly so it wouldn't have those advanced features that you get in the 89 ). Anyway, I find it surprising how often that happens that the contrast is super low that you can't read it and you have to bump it up manually using the hot-keys on the calculator. From memory if the batteries are dead for a long time, when you pop in new ones, the contrast defaults to a very low level. Interesting that it still seemed to happen even thou the calculators have small backup batteries like a PC has.

[Heihachi_73]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

That's weird as the 9550 is a budget 9600 (same GPU), and the 9500 is the lower end 9700. Did GPU-Z give you this name for you "upgraded" 9500 ?

I have an unmodified "Sapphire" Radeon 9550 (256MB), I never bothered hacking around with it as it worked fine as it was (I'm not much of a PC gamer).

[ratdude747]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Another Score:

$25: Dell Laser MFP 1600n. It had a 2nd tray, 64MB RAM module, and an aftermarket Toner cartrige with 42% remaining... Suppossedly works with linux (unlike most dell/lexmark shit).

edit- the printing side does wprk with linux... via the lexmark e210 driver.

[ratdude747]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Not one of my "best" deals, but it's interesting enough to post:

$20 grab bag:

-NEC ND-3520AW DVD+-RW DL burner
-2x GeIL 256MB PC3200 Gaming RAM, with copper heatsinks, high density. Feels like real copper too (heavy). Useless, but they look cool (even has 3D logos) and if I ever do an oldskool OC rig (I have a gigabyte SID board perfect for that), I have my RAM.

I also scored a lightly used Otter box defender case/belt clip for my Iphone 3GS for $7...

[iMic]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

I wonder if they make an adpater for that... IIRC it's DVI (with something else added?) in a different connector?

It's DVI, with USB passed through and a 24v feed to drive the display - all in the one connector. If you could supply 24v to the display separately and just feed a DVI signal into the ADC connector, you would have a working display, but it would be messy. Apple did make DVI to ADC converters, but they weren't overly common and command a serious premium these days.

~

So, I just moved house, and found a couple of other freebies from a while back that you all may be interested to hear about.

A couple of years ago, my manager tossed this away after its Logic Board failed. I could hit the button, the fans would start to turn, then immediately cut out. Looked like a dead short in the board somewhere. The serial number came back as a MacBook Pro (Early 2008), 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo with a 512MB nVidia GeForce 8600M GT. I took it and kept it shelved for about 18 months.



Not long ago, I came across a few boxes of destroyed Apple machines, a few MacBooks, some Pros and the like. A lot of them were crushed, bent or liquid damaged, some of them in great physical condition but with bad electronics. One of the crushed machines was another 2.5GHz MacBook Pro. Extracted the board from the chassis and on a bench test, it fired up fine. Sweet!

I swapped the working board into the dead MacBook Pro, but while I had it apart, I cleaned the machine top to bottom, cleaned up some of the casting lines in the magnesium fan ducts with a rotary tool and polished up the heatsink surfaces. I went with Arctic Silver 5 for the thermal material. I run the fans a little faster than normal at around 3200rpm. It tops out at around 58C in normal use, but idles somewhere around 35C. The combination of mods allows this machine to flow a lot more air than stock, which definitely helps in a machine like this.

And in the box with the damaged machines was a new-old-stock NewerTech NuPower Battery. Score! No more slowly self-inflating Apple / Sony battery.

So it's now a working MacBook Pro, 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB Memory, 320GB HDD and a 512MB nVidia GeForce 8600M GT, with a new aftermarket battery. It's running OS X Mountain Lion, but I'm thinking of bumping it to a dual boot of Snow Leopard and Mavericks. I use it mostly for sound production and editing. It's possibly the best Mac I've ever owned, built rather solid, runs fairly cool with the modifications, and in terms of reliability, it blows my much newer MacBook Air out of the water. If you ask me, not a bad score!

[momaka]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

I found a Denon AVR-3200 6-channel receiver thrown out on the street in front of a house yesterday. The amplifier looks nice and beefy.

Funny thing is, just 2 days prior to that, I went out biking on the night right before trash day to see if there was anything cool being thrown out since it's just past Christmas... but nothing. Then I went out Sat afternoon to get some bread from the grocery store and on the way there I saw the Denon receiver.

The good news is: it powers on and doesn't kick into any protection mode.
The bad news is: sound output is very quiet even when the amp is turned nearly all the way up. Even worse, left channel on the front outputs is dead (both speaker A and B positions) and the right channel on the rear outputs is dead. This is for all inputs, except PHONO, where I do get sound from speakers, but I also get faint cracking noises every once in a while and the audio jumps a little in volume.

I'm guessing something is wrong in the pre-amp stage, but we will see when I tear into it someday. Also, I didn't get the remote that comes with it, and it seems that I need it for almost all of the more sophisticated functions. Ah....

[c_hegge]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

No pics, but I got myself an ST2000DM003 2TB HDD absolutely free. My boss pulled and broke the power connector when trying unplug another HDD which was on the same chain. All I had to do was scavenge the connectors off another dead HDD. Since the donor HDD wasn't quite identical, I had to cut the connector down to make it fit, so it looks a little rough, but it works.

[SkipP]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

I found and fixed a Pioneer VSX-522k. I sold it for $60, and found another Pioneer VSX-523k in the same alley in the original box. I fixed it, cleaned it up, and sold it on ebay for over $100 plus the buyer paid shipping.

My personal best was a stach of aluminum airplane parts (over 200lbs sold at 40 cents a pound) or almost 80 pounds of copper printing plates (at the time I got $2.50 a pound).

[Hondaman]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

This is probably not the finest example of thrift in this thread, but I picked up an old Fisher AD-883 CD player at the "Peddler's Mall" a couple of weeks ago (a "flea market" inside an old grocery store/supermarket, sellers don't have to be there much at all). Manufactured in the 7th week of 1988 (the CD player, not the old grocery store).

There is a connector on the back for the IR remote sensor, almost certainly proprietary. The connector looks like the connector where your sound card accepts output from your PC's CD-ROM player (or DVD-RW +/-).

For $18 plus tax, I have no remote. It holds one disc, so I have to change them often. The "eject" button causes the drawer to slide out and back in almost immediately, so you had better have that next music CD ready. And there does not appear to be any way to change this behavior.

But it brings back memories of a more carefree time in my life, and for me, that's worth the money. (First, it knows about "index numbers" used on old classical CDs, and second, it has the old plastic tab on the bottom so you can lock the laser and it won't be damaged when you move the unit. Early 5.25 inch floppy drives had such locks too, IIRC.)

Also, two days ago I grabbed a DVD player from my neighbor's trash. It is an RCA/Thompson RC-5220P. I removed 2 cm of snow from it. I turned it on and ejected and closed the drawer, but I don't know if it works yet. No remote, but it has buttons ON THE UNIT for up, down, right, left and enter. Also it looks like it will put out Dolby DTS sound (if it was recorded on the DVD you are watching), but only if you use an optical connector to deliver the signal to an amplifier.

Just think -- the "rich" in North Korea have VCRs, and we have generations better electronics in this thread for zero or very, very little money !

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

the free scores for today have been several legit/valid VLK's for server 2003 32 and 64. Also scored server 2008 with a valid license, still in the shrinkwrap.

[momaka]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

I got myself an HP Photosmart (Photoshart as ratdude called it ) Touch b209a printer last weekend off of CL. Reason: "Ink System Failure". Can't even scan with it because of that error! Idiotic, isn't it?
So, I took it apart yesterday and did quite a bit of cleaning. The ink wastepad was very soaked with old ink. Heads weren't clogged but were dirty as hell, so I gave them a "hot bath" in a jar of hot water overnight. Going to let them dry for a few days, along with some other parts I washed. Will probably need to do a
hard reset after that (I never tried it before). If this doesn't work, I found the CMOS battery on the main board - that should do it too, I think.
And if nothing works, at least I'll have some nice spare Torx screws, a 550-size DC can motor, a 380-size DC motor, some belts, gears, optical encoders, and other cool stuff.

Also, a note on this printer, it uses a nearly identical paper feed mechanism to an OfficeJet 8500 Pro I took apart a while back. That leads me to think that many of these HP Inkjets use this similar mechanism. What I want to point out about it is that there's a thin plastic crown gear on it that tends to break quite often. So, if you get an HP inkjet with "grinding gears at startup" problem, this is probably it. Not too hard of a fix, but need to take apart the whole printer - and that isn't all that fun as this is a consumer-orinented printer. But it's do-able. I had to break quite a few plastic pieces on mine simply because I didn't have the nerves to figure out how to take them off. It's all cosmetic, though . Maybe I'll even write a HOW-TO, if anyone really cares about that.

Just think -- the "rich" in North Korea have VCRs, and we have generations better electronics in this thread for zero or very, very little money !

Yes, very true.

About CD players, there is an older model Yamaha Natural Sound being offered in my local CL at home. I've been seeing this guy put up the posting for a while now. If it's not a fake post of some sort, I might actually go for it the next time I'm there. Would be a good match for my Yamaha Natural Sound RX-830 stereo reciever I bought at the end of last summer.

(Sidenote here, but I think I got quite a deal with that Yamaha amp. Most amps from the same era and newer have a lot "sloppier" THD specs. Moreover, it can take down to 6 Ohm speakers, which not many amps of that era do. I actually tried it down with 2 sets of 8 Ohm speakers and it was still okay - ran a little warmer but not by much. Also old enough to NOT use an optical encoder for the volume knob - I HATE THOSE!!!).

[Almared]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Cool

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Scored one of these for $25.00 at the goodwill store. They thought it was a TV! Morons!! 30" 16:10 2560x1600 monitor!! YAY!! They marked it down from $50 because it didn't come with a remote... I love idiots!!

http://www.amazon.com/Dell-UltraShar.../dp/B004KKGF1O

Now I need to find another one...a pair in a dual config would be peachy!!

[kc8adu]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

what a score!

[ratdude747]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Scored one of these for $25.00 at the goodwill store. They thought it was a TV! Morons!! 30" 16:10 2560x1600 monitor!! YAY!! They marked it down from $50 because it didn't come with a remote... I love idiots!!

http://www.amazon.com/Dell-UltraShar.../dp/B004KKGF1O

Now I need to find another one...a pair in a dual config would be peachy!!

And I though the Compaq WF1907 (19" 1440x900 w/ speakers + dvi) I saw for today $15 was a steal. I may go back for it... I already had $10 on another score and I didn't need another so I left it.. Although the background of the test screen was red tinged (the RGB Part was fine though)... yeah, not a deal?