Junk machine

[Charlie Wilkes]

A neighbor of mine is one of these people who manages to get to know
everyone, and he keeps getting junked computers, which he brings to me
to look at and keep anything I might want.

Yesterday, he showed up with a box containing an Abit NF7 board and an
Athlon 1700, with a couple of 40gb hard drives. Someone had tossed it
out at the landfill. I put it in a sleek micron case from another
junked machine and scrounged together 384mb of junked RAM to add to
the 256 already on the board. The best junked video card in my
collection is an nvidia with 64mb of ram. Nobody is throwing away
128mb cards quite yet.

Anyway, it all works just like it did when it was brand-new, back in
April 2003.

Charlie

 

[StsLived]

A neighbor of mine is one of these people who manages to get to know
everyone, and he keeps getting junked computers, which he brings to me
to look at and keep anything I might want.

Yesterday, he showed up with a box containing an Abit NF7 board and an
Athlon 1700, with a couple of 40gb hard drives. Someone had tossed it
out at the landfill. I put it in a sleek micron case from another
junked machine and scrounged together 384mb of junked RAM to add to
the 256 already on the board. The best junked video card in my
collection is an nvidia with 64mb of ram. Nobody is throwing away
128mb cards quite yet.

Anyway, it all works just like it did when it was brand-new, back in
April 2003.

Charlie

amazing is it not we in a throw away world.............nobody wants to buy a
2003 comp when you can buy a machine with much more power and capacity for
half the price.

 

[Ian Ozenthroat]

amazing is it not we in a throw away world.............nobody wants to buy a
2003 comp when you can buy a machine with much more power and capacity for
half the price.

And all because they just want the latest peice of kit, NOT because the PC no longer
performs the tasks they normally do.

 

[km]

A neighbor of mine is one of these people who manages to get to know
everyone, and he keeps getting junked computers, which he brings to me
to look at and keep anything I might want.

Yesterday, he showed up with a box containing an Abit NF7 board and an
Athlon 1700, with a couple of 40gb hard drives. Someone had tossed it
out at the landfill. I put it in a sleek micron case from another
junked machine and scrounged together 384mb of junked RAM to add to
the 256 already on the board. The best junked video card in my
collection is an nvidia with 64mb of ram. Nobody is throwing away
128mb cards quite yet.

Anyway, it all works just like it did when it was brand-new, back in
April 2003.

Charlie

What are you collecting all these systems for?

I have one I use for regular activity. Another for testing difficult
situations or trialing new software. A third, very old 486, is used to
simply keep financial details and activities.

After that I would only be filling up space and saving the rubbish tip
from getting rid of them.

KM

 

[Man-wai Chang]

A neighbor of mine is one of these people who manages to get to know

everyone, and he keeps getting junked computers, which he brings to me
to look at and keep anything I might want.

450Mhz with 256M RAM is enough for internet surfing and typing letters.

--
.~. Might, Courage, Vision, SINCERITY. http://www.linux-sxs.org
/ v \ Simplicity is Beauty! May the Force and Farce be with you!
/( _ )\ (Ubuntu 5.10) Linux 2.6.16.16
^ ^ 17:57:02 up 1 day 2:24 0 users load average: 1.00 1.00 1.00
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[Man-wai Chang]

And all because they just want the latest peice of kit, NOT because the
PC no longer performs the tasks they normally do.

They bought PC for games, not doing serious work. How many people are
using these super PC to solve real-world problems?

--
.~. Might, Courage, Vision, SINCERITY. http://www.linux-sxs.org
/ v \ Simplicity is Beauty! May the Force and Farce be with you!
/( _ )\ (Ubuntu 5.10) Linux 2.6.16.16
^ ^ 17:58:01 up 1 day 2:25 0 users load average: 1.00 1.00 1.00
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[Man-wai Chang]

They bought PC for games, not doing serious work. How many people are
using these super PC to solve real-world problems?

And excuse me, can computer really solve problems?

--
.~. Might, Courage, Vision, SINCERITY. http://www.linux-sxs.org
/ v \ Simplicity is Beauty! May the Force and Farce be with you!
/( _ )\ (Ubuntu 5.10) Linux 2.6.16.16
^ ^ 17:59:01 up 1 day 2:26 0 users load average: 1.00 1.00 1.00
news://news.3home.net news://news.hkpcug.org news://news.newsgroup.com.hk

 

[Falco98]

450Mhz with 256M RAM is enough for internet surfing and typing letters.

or running a nice Linux server...

 

[Falco98]

A neighbor of mine is one of these people who manages to get to know
everyone, and he keeps getting junked computers, which he brings to me
to look at and keep anything I might want.

Yesterday, he showed up with a box containing an Abit NF7 board and an
Athlon 1700, with a couple of 40gb hard drives. Someone had tossed it
out at the landfill. I put it in a sleek micron case from another
junked machine and scrounged together 384mb of junked RAM to add to
the 256 already on the board. The best junked video card in my
collection is an nvidia with 64mb of ram. Nobody is throwing away
128mb cards quite yet.

Anyway, it all works just like it did when it was brand-new, back in
April 2003.

Charlie

My girlfriend is mad at me because i keep acquiring old systems (only a
small handful at this point, but hey). My main problem (with her) is
that i don't have a lot of space to store these things, so they kinda
end up on the kitchen table.
My real problem now is, She and I both have established systems set up
in our bedrooms, I have a nice one (better than mine) i inherited from
my best friend on the kitchen table (trying to decide what to do with it
and the 300 G of interesting junk he had on his HDD's), and now yet
another (PII) from my GF's parents that I need to look at and do
something with. In addition to these, i have a little old P1 sitting on
the stereo speaker (it has XP on it, and I use it via PCanywhere to play
music over the network by way of the living room stereo), and an
inactive little old P1 box with Fedora on it (it's a little too slow to
work very well unfortunately). The problem is, I want to shift around
the components to make good systems for her and me, and donate some
stuff to my dad.. but it's just so overwhelming i don't know where to
start. Oh well, guess i'll just dive in...

 

[Larc]

| My girlfriend is mad at me because i keep acquiring old systems (only a
| small handful at this point, but hey). My main problem (with her) is
| that i don't have a lot of space to store these things, so they kinda
| end up on the kitchen table.
| My real problem now is, She and I both have established systems set up
| in our bedrooms, I have a nice one (better than mine) i inherited from
| my best friend on the kitchen table (trying to decide what to do with it
| and the 300 G of interesting junk he had on his HDD's), and now yet
| another (PII) from my GF's parents that I need to look at and do
| something with. In addition to these, i have a little old P1 sitting on
| the stereo speaker (it has XP on it, and I use it via PCanywhere to play
| music over the network by way of the living room stereo), and an
| inactive little old P1 box with Fedora on it (it's a little too slow to
| work very well unfortunately). The problem is, I want to shift around
| the components to make good systems for her and me, and donate some
| stuff to my dad.. but it's just so overwhelming i don't know where to
| start. Oh well, guess i'll just dive in...

I may as well admit it outright: I'd be quite unhappy if I didn't have a lot of
old computers and parts lying around to tinker with. I give most of those I
build from castoffs away, but I do keep a couple on hand in addition to my
primary and secondary systems and my laptop. The extras come in handy for
testing hardware and software.

Larc



§§§ - Change planet to earth to reply by email - §§§

 

[Norm De Plume]

They bought PC for games, not doing serious work.

Since when are games NOT serious work?

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

My girlfriend is mad at me because i keep acquiring old systems (only a
small handful at this point, but hey). My main problem (with her) is
that i don't have a lot of space to store these things, so they kinda
end up on the kitchen table.
My real problem now is, She and I both have established systems set up
in our bedrooms, I have a nice one (better than mine) i inherited from
my best friend on the kitchen table (trying to decide what to do with it
and the 300 G of interesting junk he had on his HDD's), and now yet
another (PII) from my GF's parents that I need to look at and do
something with. In addition to these, i have a little old P1 sitting on
the stereo speaker (it has XP on it, and I use it via PCanywhere to play
music over the network by way of the living room stereo), and an
inactive little old P1 box with Fedora on it (it's a little too slow to
work very well unfortunately). The problem is, I want to shift around
the components to make good systems for her and me, and donate some
stuff to my dad.. but it's just so overwhelming i don't know where to
start. Oh well, guess i'll just dive in...

Yeah. I can relate. I'm about to set up a 486 laptop as a dedicated
tide-table server. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

The pickings are getting pretty rich, it seems to me. I would guess
this athlon box was one that a teenager used for a couple of years,
and then tossed because of minor problems. It came in a gaudy case,
with a lot of dust inside, cosmetic damage outside and a broken
optical drive. I hosed everything down out in the back yard, put it
in a better case and added some memory, albeit slightly mismatched. I
installed Win 2k and Fedora 3 and everything runs great. This one is
nice enough so I should be able to give it away.

Charlie

 

[Man-wai Chang]

Since when are games NOT serious work?

hmmm...
OK, I was referring to the game players, not developers.

--
.~. Might, Courage, Vision, SINCERITY. http://www.linux-sxs.org
/ v \ Simplicity is Beauty! May the Force and Farce be with you!
/( _ )\ (Ubuntu 5.10) Linux 2.6.16.16
^ ^ 21:59:01 up 4 days 4:06 1 user load average: 1.03 1.03 1.00
news://news.3home.net news://news.hkpcug.org news://news.newsgroup.com.hk