best cheap/free scores 1.1

[ratdude747]

Originally Posted by Topcat

I didn't take a pic, but there was an AZIO clicky/mechanical backlit keyboard as well as a few otehr older systems that really aren't worth mentioning....some old lenovo FM2 A10 system (bad motherboard) and an emachine pentium 4 that works but otherwise useless....

With some welding, pentium 4 emachine cases house Supermicro X7DCA's nicely

https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=69058

[Topcat]

Originally Posted by ratdude747

With some welding, pentium 4 emachine cases house Supermicro X7DCA's nicely

https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=69058

You're not going to believe this one, but I sold my last spare X7DCA to a walk-in yesterday!

He was drooling over the dell/alienware R7 X7DCA build I did but didn't quite have the scratch for it....but I did sell him a spare one I had here with 2x E5450's and 32gb RAM in it.

[alfanet]

LCD Samsung 40" screen damaged need repair for connectors .

[Topcat]

Originally Posted by Topcat

Not a bad week so far.... got a HP minitower, 7th gen i5 w/ 16gb RAM and a 2tb spinner. Motherboard is bad, found a replacement for $40 shipped so I ordered it. I'll pull the spinner. The motherboard has a M.2 PCIe slot, which I'll use instead; I have a 512gb M.2 I harvested from a junk laptop not long ago, the drive is good.

The motherboard came for this today and away it went. I have to say, not a bad little system, all things considered. With the M.2 + Linux, its damn snappy! I booted it off the spinner, which had Win10 home on it, and it was miserable....I was going to snoop, but it contained no local account to break into....so I just nuked the drive and did a Mint 20.3 install on the M.2. Yes, I did peel that big white label sticker off the side.







This post created from it....but just a bit of a FWIW....I've sold a lot of people on Mint that just need a basic use system (laptop or tower); such as web browsing, email, facebarf, office-related stuff, and basic photo editing..... If they want to pay for a Windows license, I'm happy to install it for them....but usually after a quick demo of Mint, many are willing to try it. Of the 2 dozen-ish I've succeeded with this, I've only had one come back and say he wanted to go back to Windows.

[ratdude747]

Scored a Logitech Performance MX mouse for $0.99. Paired it to a spare unifying reciever I had sitting, works great... but the jury's out on the battery (rechargable AA NiMH, easy to replace).

[Topcat]

Originally Posted by ratdude747

Scored a Logitech Performance MX mouse for $0.99. Paired it to a spare unifying reciever I had sitting, works great... but the jury's out on the battery (rechargable AA NiMH, easy to replace).

I have the MX1000 mouse, I charge it maybe once a month.

[ratdude747]

Originally Posted by Topcat

I have the MX1000 mouse, I charge it maybe once a month.

My last laptop to use unifying was the E6430... my last one with mini-PCIe slots that could be adapted to internal USB dongles. Such an adapter doesn't exist for m.2 AFAIK so my thinkpads have all been multi-profile bluetooth.

Which reminds me of a score I forgot to mention: I scored the Logitech K850 keyboard that goes with my M720 Triathalon mouse for $2 on Saturday. Like the mouse, it's the white & gray kind... which means all the buttons are dual marked for mac and windows/linux! Not nearly as useful as the mouse (since I use with with my current main laptop, the T460s), but good to have for hotel use (like the mouse, it's a combo of unifying and three-profile bluetooth).

[TechGeek]

Western Digital 80GB Special Edition EIDE hard disk from 2002, still brand new in the factory shrink-wrap. $78 shipped. Drive works just fine and I'm cloning an 80GB Maxtor drive to it as I speak.

[Topcat]

Originally Posted by TechGeek

Western Digital 80GB Special Edition EIDE hard disk from 2002, still brand new in the factory shrink-wrap. $78 shipped. Drive works just fine and I'm cloning an 80GB Maxtor drive to it as I speak.

What made it 'special'? Bigger cache? Faster rotation speed?

[TechGeek]

Originally Posted by Topcat

What made it 'special'? Bigger cache? Faster rotation speed?

8MB of cache compared to 2MB. Everything was in MINT condition, like it had been sitting in an office storeroom since 2002.

[Topcat]

Originally Posted by TechGeek

8MB of cache compared to 2MB. Everything was in MINT condition, like it had been sitting in an office storeroom since 2002.

...or govt surplus....I've gotten so many neat things that we the taxpayers paid big bucks for, never got used, and then either scrapped or sold at auction. I scored a never used quadro m6000 24gb, surplus from a university....that's a ~$1000 card even today, I'd hate to even guess what they paid for it....and then jst gave it away....it was given to me in a goodie box of other random things.

Nice drive for the period. I remember shortly thereafter they released the 10K raptors, first releases (3.5", not the 2.5" velociraptors, they came a little later) were 36gb with a 74gb following...8mb caches, but these were SATA1, not much faster than IDE....but they were nice on an IDE interface with an adapter. They were freight trains, you couldn't kill one!

[Dan81]

Pulled the trigger on another 440BX gem. This time - an ABIT BE6-II !

You'd imagine I'd stop after getting an equally rare Soyo 6BA +IV and a ASUS P2B (which to be honest, is getting scarce here in Romania!) on my hands. No way I'mma stop there. B-)

[TechGeek]

APC SMT1000 with AP9620 Legacy Communications Card for free, works; needs an RBC6 pack, which I found on Amazon for $90.

[Dan81]

Scored a free ASUS A7N8X-VM/400. Basically the GF4MX version of the A7N8X - flashed the absolutely crappy AMIBIOS to Award (Chaintech 7NIF2) and besides a non-working thermal sensor (doesn't trip, it's just sitting stuck at 100*C with no option to turn it off) so far Windows 98SE started loving it - booted extremely fast and detected almost more than half of the hardware, bar the AC97 sound chip from Realtek (yes, it has a Realtek chip, not CMI8738 as I read somewhere else.), a few USB ports plus the Ethernet side (which is basically down to me needing to install the drivers for nForce on 98SE.), everything works and is rather snappy.

[brethin]

Originally Posted by TechGeek

Western Digital 80GB Special Edition EIDE hard disk from 2002, still brand new in the factory shrink-wrap. $78 shipped. Drive works just fine and I'm cloning an 80GB Maxtor drive to it as I speak.

I have 10 of these with under 100 hrs of use, they aren't that special and I have never seen them go for more than $20.

[Dan81]

Scored a recased Spire Jewel unit (guessing it's the 380W model), Sun Pro AT-2005B PCB. Comes in handy as it's beefy all around while maintaining a low profile, has a strong enough 5v rail and has the -5v wire too.

Whoever owned it before me literally just replaced the main caps with Panasonic CE 680uF 200v, but left the other JEE caps on the secondary, as well as a Fuhjyyu on the 5vsb. Recapped with Nichicon HM (2008 datecode), Rubycon MBZ, Sanyo WG for 5vSB.

[ratdude747]

Scored a cartload of stuff at Goodwill Outlet for $21... Which included a HP Laserjet Pro CP1525nw Color. Works great and had 4 full 3rd part toner cartridges.

As soon as I give one away another hunts me down...

[Topcat]

^
Nice pickup. To my surprise, good laser printers sell....I've sold quite a few, for a nice profit.

[ratdude747]

Originally Posted by Topcat

^
Nice pickup. To my surprise, good laser printers sell....I've sold quite a few, for a nice profit.

Yep. Other than being slow and only having 150 pages, nothing wrong with it. Full toners, heck the tray was half full of paper

Worst part is if it's at the outlet, that means a regular goodwill store either couldn't sell it or rejected it. The bad news for heavy stuff is that the outlet sells stuff by the pound ($1.59), but if you have an item over 20lb, the manager is allowed to (and usually will if requested) override the per-pound price for the item (or the whole cart!) to help such things move. The only downside is complete PC sales are not allowed (even if no HDD) so if one slips though, if you try to buy it and ask for a 20lb discount, they pull it instead. It's a game all right... dare I say a rat race?

[ratdude747]

Originally Posted by ratdude747

Scored a cartload of stuff at Goodwill Outlet for $21... Which included a HP Laserjet Pro CP1525nw Color. Works great and had 4 full 3rd part toner cartridges.

As soon as I give one away another hunts me down...

Ended up using it to retire a less than useful Laserjet 4L (which I was using with a Jetdirect 500x)... Dimensionally it's close enough to the 4L that it happens to fit on the bottom of my garage bench server/printer stand. A bit tight vertically (3"), but thankfully everything is serviced from the front/back so this isn't an issue. Ethernet printing works (didn't test or care for wireless), so I'm really at a loss to why it was tossed