TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

Using thriftstores here for scavenging old parts has been in decline for several years where I live and these days it's next to impossible to even find anything worthwhile. I actually seem to have more luck bumping into a PC left on the sidewalk then to find something for sale that is worth buying.

Here in the United States finding a thrift store that will sell there vintage computers (or any computers) is extremely rare as most will just send them to the recycler. Goodwills in particular in most states does this as according to the laws they could get in trouble if someone bought a PC with a bunch of sensitive user information on it and used it to harm owner of said information. Its to avoid the "I gave you a computer and someone stole my identity using it" law suit. Im pretty sure there are also other more or less unrelated laws in someone states that would prevent thrift stores from easily reselling there vintage items without an in house tech to sanitize them. I'm lucky as one of my local thrift stores lets me scavange from there scrap pile. Some of the small town thrifts are pretty relaxed about this stuff and will sell them to you under the table if you ask the right people AKA management (especially the charity/church ran ones where the employee's can make the mental "Well morally this is the right thing to do as X organization needs the money to do good things" call)

My regional recycler which takes in items from 6 countys and two college towns also is the most douche filled place on the planet. Not to mention all electronics are "Property of the County" upon arrival and no one there will let you buy/take any of the equipment due to more ass backwards laws in Illinois (This state sucks.....). I asked what would happen if i just came and grabbed something and the employee on duty said something along the lines of if he let someone take something he would get fired and that he would be required to call the cops. I could really just go at night if i wanted to but I shouldn't have to. I tried emailing upper management to see if i could work out some sort of deal with them or the county and there contact email actually doesn't even exist.....

The thing about stolen identity, hm...

There is one local thrift store that still sells PCs. It's usually barren, bunch of 478/775/etc XP/Vista/7 boxes but one time they had a beige PC with a Pentium II sticker on it for $2. Picked it right up.

Brought home and it gave some beeps. Pulled RAM out, there was rust on it 😲

Long story short, replaced RAM and it fired right up to Windows 98. Had all user files on it, even a flyer for a Golds Gym opening in 2003 near me.

By the way, it had a Celeron 400 in it instead of a Pentium II like the case badge said. 🤣

nforce4max wrote:

senrew wrote:

South Florida is a graveyard. None of the big chain thrifts accept the computers, and if they do, they just recycle it. I watched someone drop off a box of random old modems and other less desirable cards and the lady literally just dumped it into a huge bin marked "RECYCLING".

There are a few independent e-recyclers here, plus the local city dumps. They'll take the machines but refuse to let you take it out of the piles. Dropped off a few empty rusted cases a few months ago and in the bins were a TON of old AT cases. I asked about taking some with me and they told me it was illegal in the county due to hazardous materials in the chips or some such stupidity. Had a bit of a heart palpitation bout thinking about it on the way home.

If I had seen that I would have blown a fuse, really stupid of these places to turn down paying customers just to "recycle" for a few cents in metal scrap.

For most of them, it really is the bullshit laws which really do exist and really are as stupid as they sound. There not just going to turn away the potential source of revenue for no reason.

cj_reha wrote:

The thing about stolen identity, hm... […]
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TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

Using thriftstores here for scavenging old parts has been in decline for several years where I live and these days it's next to impossible to even find anything worthwhile. I actually seem to have more luck bumping into a PC left on the sidewalk then to find something for sale that is worth buying.

Here in the United States finding a thrift store that will sell there vintage computers (or any computers) is extremely rare as most will just send them to the recycler. Goodwills in particular in most states does this as according to the laws they could get in trouble if someone bought a PC with a bunch of sensitive user information on it and used it to harm owner of said information. Its to avoid the "I gave you a computer and someone stole my identity using it" law suit. Im pretty sure there are also other more or less unrelated laws in someone states that would prevent thrift stores from easily reselling there vintage items without an in house tech to sanitize them. I'm lucky as one of my local thrift stores lets me scavange from there scrap pile. Some of the small town thrifts are pretty relaxed about this stuff and will sell them to you under the table if you ask the right people AKA management (especially the charity/church ran ones where the employee's can make the mental "Well morally this is the right thing to do as X organization needs the money to do good things" call)

My regional recycler which takes in items from 6 countys and two college towns also is the most douche filled place on the planet. Not to mention all electronics are "Property of the County" upon arrival and no one there will let you buy/take any of the equipment due to more ass backwards laws in Illinois (This state sucks.....). I asked what would happen if i just came and grabbed something and the employee on duty said something along the lines of if he let someone take something he would get fired and that he would be required to call the cops. I could really just go at night if i wanted to but I shouldn't have to. I tried emailing upper management to see if i could work out some sort of deal with them or the county and there contact email actually doesn't even exist.....

The thing about stolen identity, hm...

There is one local thrift store that still sells PCs. It's usually barren, bunch of 478/775/etc XP/Vista/7 boxes but one time they had a beige PC with a Pentium II sticker on it for $2. Picked it right up.

Brought home and it gave some beeps. Pulled RAM out, there was rust on it 😲

Long story short, replaced RAM and it fired right up to Windows 98. Had all user files on it, even a flyer for a Golds Gym opening in 2003 near me.

By the way, it had a Celeron 400 in it instead of a Pentium II like the case badge said. 🤣

I grab socket 478 and 775 machines when I can. I'll thank myself someday.

Also..... How hard is it for the average idiot to wipe there hard drive before selling it? Even if that means just nuking the my documents folder?.......
The sheer amount of idiocy in this world (and this country) is absolutely amazing.

Most people may as well be dragging their knuckles on the ground and grunting like apes while posting on social media on their phones when it comes to tech. I take practically anything I can get my hands on, even salved systems that were left out in the rain to rot. The worst of the worst for me were systems that once had mice living in them (omg).

Ah so you bought it, saw that not too long ago but wasn't interested since they were meh computers in ok-ish condition. Plus as you say it was pickup only. 🤣

The compudyne one is the most interesting of that bunch imo, love the geometric case. 🤣

I hate to see old pcs in a dumpser which due to some idiotic law is forbidden to get ... I mean I know that they must make money out of these, but then, why don't they sell them in fonction of their weight ? They are talking about having a more ecological world, but our way of "recycling" them is so munch more ecological than destroying them ... Nearby the belgium border there is a huge recycling center that is the place where they destroy this stuff in order to make "more valuable things" and guess what ? All around, cultivation is completely forbidden due to pollution. If they wanted ecology, what kind of ecology is that ?!

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

I grab socket 478 and 775 machines when I can. I'll thank myself someday.

Also..... How hard is it for the average idiot to wipe there hard drive before selling it? Even if that means just nuking the my documents folder?.......
The sheer amount of idiocy in this world (and this country) is absolutely amazing.

Very difficult, especially seeing the average idiot is incapable of understanding the difference between "your Windows installation is screwed up and Windows needs to be freshly reinstalled" and "this hard disk is beyond saving due to bad sectors".

Sometimes I think using a computer should require obtaining a permit akin to a driving licence...

Deksor wrote:

I mean I know that they must make money out of these, but then, why don't they sell them in fonction of their weight?

Be honest, how many people are really going to line up to buy 20 year old hardware? And I mean outside Vogons and other enthusiast forums? And who knows what will happen to our collection once we kick the bucket, how is the hardware treated? Is it going to be safely recycled or dumped somewhere on the curb? It might end up being more of an ecological problem after we're gone. I understand everyone here is excited about old stuff, but we need to be realistic here.

sf78 wrote:

Deksor wrote:

I mean I know that they must make money out of these, but then, why don't they sell them in fonction of their weight?

Be honest, how many people are really going to line up to buy 20 year old hardware? And I mean outside Vogons and other enthusiast forums? And who knows what will happen to our collection once we kick the bucket, how is the hardware treated? Is it going to be safely recycled or dumped somewhere on the curb? It might end up being more of an ecological problem after we're gone. I understand everyone here is excited about old stuff, but we need to be realistic here.

Well one can pretty much assume that maybe >>99% of all the stuff that ends up being trashed or recycled, never even got into the hands of a single collector, so even if we were to dump everything all at once, it's a mere drop of water falling into the ocean 😜

And on top of that, by then there will most likely be more interest in this stuff (also because the amount will most likely have been trimmed down even more, if only due to malfunctioning components being trashed by collectors themselves).

And the stuff that was not recycled because it ended up in someone's collection, will probably be recycled in a more environmental way than when the never-picked-up stuff that was being dumped back then.

Sometimes I think using a computer should require obtaining a permit akin to a driving licence...

* looks at belgium* *shakes head* *runs back home for safety*

Computer #2 - Compudyne 3SX/16

It's dead Jim.

Once again, dropbox gallery

I like this case. The entire top lid comes off with just a couple latches making easy access to the internals. However, once I looked inside, the condition appeared just too messed up. Kinda looks like the thing was flooded and I dunno, rusted?

I plugged it in to test, and when I clicked the power button, I only got a faint hum from the power supply. Figured I'd swap in the known good one from the previous Octek system. But...when I went to pull out the wires from the power switch, I noticed that the damn cables are soldered on! I don't have the equipment to deal with this or convert the switch to add the little dongles for the standard u-clip thingies on standard AT psu units.

Anyway, examining the parts, it's got an ATI VGA Charger video card, some kind of Acer chipset IDE/floppy/comm/lpt I/O card, and a modem that I just pulled out and added to my slush pile. I only saw the two floppy drives and didn't think there was a hard drive, but when I pulled out the PSU, there it was underneath. A conner 120MB unit that I assume was the flavor of the day back then.

I'm going to assume for the time being that the drives and cards are functional, but I won't be able to test that theory yet. For now, I'm going to call this machine dead, but I'd hate to toss the case since it is such a nice and easy one to work in. I'll keep it around and see what I can do to convert the power switch to a standard AT connector. If I can do that, I'll put the effort in to clean the case up to as close to pristine as possible and reuse it.

Computer #3 - HP Vectra VLi8

It's dead Jim.

Seriously, this one is less than useless to me and the case is somewhere north of 99.99999% rust. The board is a 440ZX chipset so not too special to me. P3-550, which I have 3 others of. 64MB ram, meh. The only really interesting thing I found here was Matrox G200 integrated video on the board. Never seen that before. I may keep the board if it's not proprietary in anyway for a backup slot 1 machine. I dunno. The drives seem to be ok, so those will stay as spares.

The final machine is a PCChips special that seems to work ok except for one or two things, but that is a post for another night. 😉

At least one of the local recyclers in my area is open to the public, they tear the systems down though, you can't buy one thats complete at all, I guess so they can make sure no ones data gets stolen, and they do not sell Hard Drives, but I don't mind. They did say at the end of each month the unsold stuff goes into the shredder and then shipped out for processing.

Supplies dry up very quickly here, i am lucky to have started at the right time when i could pick up a lot of stuff still cheap. Cheap does not mean free so it did cost quite a bit of money anyway but at least it was noway near the prices of ebay....

Fortunately since beginning this year i found a recycler where i got acces. No guarantees and still not free ofcourse but very cheap some parts can be found. Takes a lot of time to actually find something interesting and worth saving but it is boatloads of fun for me. Less than 10 percent is old stuff. Less than 1 percent is stuff from the ''right era'' and even less is undamaged or fixable.

This stuff flies trough the air 10's of meters sometimes when they get sorted and it is unbelieveable that some motherboards still work after that! They also remove alu heatsinks with pliers (resistors get damaged or lost), bios chips, batteries and sometimes other stuff so it is important to really examine the stuff.

It is always funny to see how i handle the stuff and how they do it. I handle with care (it's my hobby!) and they are attacking it with pliers, cranes, walking over it etc... 🤣

Today i will visit them again, wish me luck!

meljor wrote:

Supplies dry up very quickly here, i am lucky to have started at the right time when i could pick up a lot of stuff still cheap. […]
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Supplies dry up very quickly here, i am lucky to have started at the right time when i could pick up a lot of stuff still cheap. Cheap does not mean free so it did cost quite a bit of money anyway but at least it was noway near the prices of ebay....

Fortunately since beginning this year i found a recycler where i got acces. No guarantees and still not free ofcourse but very cheap some parts can be found. Takes a lot of time to actually find something interesting and worth saving but it is boatloads of fun for me. Less than 10 percent is old stuff. Less than 1 percent is stuff from the ''right era'' and even less is undamaged or fixable.

This stuff flies trough the air 10's of meters sometimes when they get sorted and it is unbelieveable that some motherboards still work after that! They also remove alu heatsinks with pliers (resistors get damaged or lost), bios chips, batteries and sometimes other stuff so it is important to really examine the stuff.

It is always funny to see how i handle the stuff and how they do it. I handle with care (it's my hobby!) and they are attacking it with pliers, cranes, walking over it etc... 🤣

Today i will visit them again, wish me luck!

I think this is actually kinda sad (and I meant the way they treat these parts), but I admire your perseverance 😀
If they would let you snoop through all that stuff, it would be a real candy garden 🤣!

I've always handled everything I gotten with a lot of care, even if it seems broken (because you can never know).

It's too bad I didn't really get around to purchasing cheaply the last few years due to several things in RL that kept me occupied and kept taking priority over my PC hobby.