One man's trash.....

I was down at the local thrift store (yes I am poor) and on the way out I saw that they were throwing out old things that were broken. Anyway I go over to the dumpster and there sitting on top is a computer. I take a quick look at it, and see it has a cdrom, network interface card, and other things that I figure I can use as spare parts. Anyway I take the thing home, plug it in and am surprised as hell when the thing starts up with no problems. The OS doesnt load and I soon find out that the hard drive is bad, but that was the only thing. After swapping in one of my other junk hard drives with win95 installed on it, the thing worked perfect. I even hooked it up to my network and found that the nic was fuly functional. With a 166mhz processor, it isnt a speed demon, but it is more than fast enough for something that was free.

Good job preacher...

that's how I got my hands on my router, my backup server etc...

Nice one.

Never underestimate the power of dumpster diving. I know of one guy who started out a pretty nice business by dumpster diving in Silicon Valley (no specifics). Reselling (how shall we say?) misappropriated software. It got very lucrative.

How come the only thing I ever find is a 286?

Thats the truth. At work we have a bunch of old AMD 200's that we had no use for. I have rebuilt one of them to be a perfectly good DVD setup. I run the 200 with 98 megs RAM, Windows 98, Panasonic DVD player, and a Creative DXR3 decoder/accelerater board. It runs almost with out a single frame drop. It drops a few every now and then but thats ok. I have also rebuilt a few 386's and 486's with linux that nobody wanted.

Preacher i found some pretty good stuff in dumpsters before to like 64mb of Ram that worked just fine i put them in my old p166 i have and a 17" samsung 692c series monitor to. When i plugged it in it worked just fine to :) I found a couple of old processors like an 486 and a 386 don't use them anymore but hey they where free. :)






ANTI-HACKERS

Preacher, your a man after my own heart.


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How come the only thing I ever find is a 286?

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your not doen it right. pick an address in a middle-middle to upper middle class neighhood(they seem to be the most wasteful), call the DPW for that area and tell them youd like to clean out your fathers garage and give that address, can they please tell you when is the day for large garbage pick-up, usually 1-2 times a month in these neighborhoods. Take a drive threw that neighbor hood with a friend and a flashlight around 11 pm. you'll be horrified/delighted at the waste that goes on.

:::: Grinz::::

Good find preacher!! And I'll agree with you on the unecessary throwing away of things... heck I work for a hardware liquidator, you'd be suprised the things we see. Usually end up with some good finds on a daily basis he he.

~THEJRC~

You won't believe the things they put on the trash of local community colleges, just because to donate carries to much paperwork.

My little "Rosita" (that's my box name) is made out of junk... did I say junk???.

PII 233
96MB RAM
2 - 2GB HDD (dual boot)
2 - CDROMs
2 - Floppy drives
2 - NICs

My Rosita is just great!!!

I went to an auction at the local university one time. They had a whole pallet of junk terminals and monitors on it. I figured the monitors may come in handy when rebuilding older machines that we give away to needy children in the area. I bid on it and got the whole pallet for $40(US). The machines were mostly old unix terminals and junked out Pentiums that already had the HDD's, memory, and such ripped out. I figured it was still a good buy. 10 monitors and out of those 7 actualy worked. To my surprise though. In the middle of all this was an older HP Netserver. It had dual PII 450 Xeons, 512k RAM, and two 10GB SCSI HDD's in it. The memory alone was worth my $40. I was amaxed at what people throw away........ :rolleyes:

good stuff out there... i got myself 20" monitor, hdds and sblive cards for free and all in working conditions. sold the monitor tho, needed the cash... :D


rgds
de

*** sigh ***

I guess I should stop reading message boards so much, get out more,

and start patrolling the local dumpsters, maybe then I will find my free

puter for linux :idea:

Things got even better today as I picked up an old 4x cd burner that the CS department at my college had thrown away. I guess Im a junk man for life, anyway thanks to all who responded.

great man u are lucky to find all these things...good...

intruder..