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Getting parts from garbage

MohawkAngel

MohawkAngel

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Moving time is coming soon and lot of computers working or not ends up at border of the street or in the garbage.

1-Are you like me a computer junk freak or not?
2-Whats the best stuff you found while doing it?

Yesterday just got a real dusty one at street border:

Asus CUV4X
Intel p3 -1gig
384megs PC133
WD 80gigs
CD reader 52X
floppy 1.44
Geforce MX400 AGP-4X 64megs (VGA-RCA-Svideo)
C-Media 6 channels
3com 100mbps lan


Cleaned up, thermal paste, windows XP pro...its now working will use it as download rig.

What about you guys ?
 
we dont get stuff like that on street corners, but i certainly scavenge optical drives, hard drives and ram when i can.


an old PC can get quite a boost from a few bonus sticks of ram.
 
Mussels said:
we dont get stuff like that on street corners, but i certainly scavenge optical drives, hard drives and ram when i can.


an old PC can get quite a boost from a few bonus sticks of ram.
Click to expand...

Yes I scavenged a lot of pc parts still keeping them in a box here and when i'm lucky enough to find a full pc i swap parts and rebuild it for fun. Selling it sometimes (after I fully tested it) to people who are in needs but dont get the budget. Just to pay the clenaing stuff and thermal paste. Normally I'm selling a computer like that with keyboard, mouse, screen and printer for 60$ installation and after-sale service included :P
 
nice find... i haven't really thought of doing that with comps tbh
 
well for example, my smoothwall is a leftover P3 900Mhz with 256MB of ram. My mums PC is a socket 754 sempron 3000+ with 1GB ram and a 128MB video card - and it runs 7 fine for her needs.


Old hardware is definitely reusable so long as you get a working, stable system... its just that when one part fails (and fails for good, not just a seized fan or something) then bin it and start again.
 
I have been meaning to pick up computers from the school junk pile for a very long time, but failed to it yet due to a certain illness called procrastination...
 
xBruce88x said:
nice find... i haven't really thought of doing that with comps tbh
Click to expand...

Then now you could.

1-You remove computer toxic parts from garbage to not pollute our mother earth

2-You send back to recycling center the ones you don't use or that are not working

3-You help poor families and single moms with low budget

4-You can make small amounts of money from it... which transforms into new parts for your own rig :D

5-You build a list of new clients who trust you with time and will buy more parts or even ask you to build them a new computer when thell get the money
 
I'd pick up pc junk if I find it lying in the street...:o

The last time I was lucky, there was a pc tower lying on the pavement waiting for the garbage collectors, I picked it up and it was perfectly functional - a Pentium II with a mendocino processor and nvidia vanta graphics.
Now that I remember I should install Win 98 on it for some old-school games. It runs a tad slow on XP :laugh:
 
@ Mohawk: Isn't Canada awesome that way? I live in Kingston and when Queens University gets out for the summer, man there are some good scores. My friend and I have found several P4 boxes that work perfectly. The best we found was a 939 dual core box a decent drive in it but a minimal amount of Ram.
 
I'm usually the one tossing that stuff out. I usually can't find anyone to even give it to. My upgrade hobby/habit/addiction/obsession has gotten my relatives and friends spoiled.
 
I wish they had stuff like that on corners. Most the stuff people throw away are PC's from the 90's. Old pentium 100Mhz cpu's or just plain old old junk that they literally threw into a garbage pile to be picked up. Most of it already has the optical drives pulled, no ram, or EDO ram etc. I've been looking for a cheap way to build up my Mom's PC but a 98' Gateway system parts are hard to come by around here. 400MHz Celeron, PC100 Ram, CD-ROM.. I did upgrade her HDD to an 80GB from a 6GB. Runs like a turd though.
 
ouch a 400mhz celeron,... if it helps any you can run unreal 2000 at over 100fps with a couple 3dfx voodooIIs, i did on an old dell

but yea that old cpu would be the first thing i'd change. you could probably find a pIII at a flea market somewhere
 
MohawkAngel said:
Then now you could.

1-You remove computer toxic parts from garbage to not pollute our mother earth

2-You send back to recycling center the ones you don't use or that are not working

3-You help poor families and single moms with low budget

4-You can make small amounts of money from it... which transforms into new parts for your own rig :D

5-You build a list of new clients who trust you with time and will buy more parts or even ask you to build them a new computer when thell get the money
Click to expand...

Pays back ten fold!!:toast:


The rest is true too. Especially number 4, Ebay is the place to sell old parts. The majority in Tech forums already have nice pc's and won't by older parts though ( some buy them to mess around though!)
 
I don't gather parts from the garbage, but I do have a relationship with a nearby comp store where I get the first pick off any computer parts that get left in the store due to being upgraded/replaced/malfunctioning.

My spare parts cabinet has gotten HUGE over the last few years.
 
i go to the dump and look in the PC bin their are some pretty sweet drops. My bud found a perfect TT case HUGE full tower thing is sweet. Dual Xeons rigs etc all show up in the dump. bring it home toss in a pci card boot it up format. good to go. curently crunching for WCG 24/7
 
World Community Grid
Ah Solaris beat me lol. But we do the world some good through technology
 
I should start a crunching then... How the F.U.%.* could butterfly effect make my neighborhood
less stupid? :P Letting the computers calculate it
 
I live near Dallas Texas were most of the used computer parts end up. There is a computer fair on the first Saturday of the month were this is sold. I can find nice things out there for $1 to $10 for used parts. There are some non working parts but some can be fixed for cheap like a bad cap on a PSU or motherboard so the the non working part sells for $1 and the parts needed to fix cost under $1. In the past when is was AMD K7 or Intel P3 or P4, I found a Gigabyte S462 AMD 760 chipset motherboard non working for $1 and It had one bad cap. The board new at that time was $160 so I used it for my main system for 2 years. Not bad for $2 to buy and fix the motherboard. I like buying bad mother board too just to get parts off of there like Mofets and cap if there not the cheap ones too to repair other parts.
 
Hell ya. I love to find stuff that people toss out. Ive found enough parts over the years to build some older machines. My little server that I have set up in my house is from a few treasures found over the years. Actually I just found a perfectly good 19" CRT monitor a few weeks ago, its the display I use for my crunching farm. :rockout:
 
Hockster said:
I'm usually the one tossing that stuff out.
Click to expand...
Same here. The PC parts i put out never get picked up by the trash man. Someone always stops before he gets here and takes them.
 
I just got yesterday night a Intel D815EEA board .again at trash.....gonna put some old pc100 on it and drop in the intel 667 i got with the last 20gig WD hdd i have. Maybe linux why not ?
 
It's illegal here to get stuff from the dumps and that's a good thing (otherwise my appartment would be even more filled with trash). But I try to scavange as much as I can. HDD's for magnets and DVD-roms. Motherboards and the like could be interesting, but often they're not.
 
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