It has certainly slowed down a lot the last three years, from a thin trickle to a drip here and there. Check craigslist also, it is dead in some areas, quite lively in others. Check local newspaper classified sites. There are some local area parts sales groups on Reddit also.

Think about who owned tech in the 1990s and where they live now, yard saling in an area where there's a lot of young families is likely to get you a lot of Frozen merch but slim chance for old PC stuff.

Pickings are somewhat slim where I live (also in Canada).

Occasionally desirable items show up on local listings, but they tend to go quickly. Missed out on an Amiga 2000 this way.

Local thrift stores also rarely have vintage items. Sometimes computer stuff from early 2000s shows up. Games too.

Have a friend who lucked out and found an SC-55 locally for about $10. It's the luckiest local find I've heard about in awhile.

Yeah I'd get a Sound Canvas module if I saw one locally under $60 or so, but not interested enough otherwise.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-04-11, 20:10:

Yeah I'd get a Sound Canvas module if I saw one locally under $60 or so, but not interested enough otherwise.

seems like the best thing to do at this point is to take the risk and search out abandond buildings for left over PC's.

Here in spain is very easy to found whatever you need, from a Xt motherboard to CRTs, sound blaster cards,whatever

Locally .. not a damn chance, if it wasn't for Evilbay I wouldn't find much at all.

Depends what you are looking for. I started collecting less than 2 years ago and have found that late 90s systems are fairly common. I've picked up half a dozen 90s laptops that cost me between $20 and $50. Except for one 486, each was a Pentium. Desktops are more rare, but I have picked up a couple of Pentiums without breaking the bank. I also picked up a couple of Mac G4s and an eMac over the past couple of years. I've found that it's harder to get anything older than that for a decent price. A few C64s and Amigas have popped up, but I'm not paying $350 for a C64 or $800 for an Amiga. For anything from the 80s, the local sellers seem to look at eBay listings for a price. Every now and then an 80s system will be listed for a decent price, but you have to see the ad immediately to get it. I've missed out on IBM PS/1s and Tandys because I was too slow.

Here in Melbourne you used to be able to ,

people threw out amiga 500s and 1084 crts , 486 VLB motherboards, sony trinitron G420 crts, sound blaster 16s and even copies of 5.25 floppy sierra games like police quest 2.

But that's all dried up , occasionally a pentium 4 or 3 something shows up but its mostly 2010 to 2014 systems now.

Though classifieds can sometimes yield intresting deals.

Until 2 years ago it was not hard finding mid 1990 to mid 2000's parts or computers for reasonable in my area, then last year it became increasingly hard and now near impossible or way over priced.

Horun wrote on 2024-04-12, 02:38:

Until 2 years ago it was not hard finding mid 1990 to mid 2000's parts or computers for reasonable in my area, then last year it became increasingly hard and now near impossible or way over priced.

I think perhaps the Covid lockdowns had a hand in this, people with a ton of free time and cash to throw at building that retr0 rig from their childhood, higher demand drove prices higher and a lot of the kit around got bought up, now the lockdowns are over we are dealing with the economic fallout from that which has driven prices higher again along with crazy inflation, higher postage and import costs due to backed up shipping.

I have a feeling its going to be a good number of years before prices head back to where they were before Covid, assuming the world doesn't do something stupid like have a huge war.

It is not easy locally. Sometimes I find small things, a cable or a game, things like that. Sometimes iI see office quality xp machines but it is rare. I think many are selling on tradera.

I think the Swedish marked dried up years ago, before I even was interested in these things.

It wasn't hard like 5 years or more ago. Now it has pretty much dried up. Whatever pops up now it's expensive.

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-04-12, 02:45:

Horun wrote on 2024-04-12, 02:38:

Until 2 years ago it was not hard finding mid 1990 to mid 2000's parts or computers for reasonable in my area, then last year it became increasingly hard and now near impossible or way over priced.

I think perhaps the Covid lockdowns had a hand in this, people with a ton of free time and cash to throw at building that retr0 rig from their childhood, higher demand drove prices higher and a lot of the kit around got bought up, now the lockdowns are over we are dealing with the economic fallout from that which has driven prices higher again along with crazy inflation, higher postage and import costs due to backed up shipping.

I have a feeling its going to be a good number of years before prices head back to where they were before Covid, assuming the world doesn't do something stupid like have a huge war.

the problem is that these parts are only gonna get rarer and rarer driving cost up slowly but surely. hopfully old computer hardware doesnt become a more mainstream hobby like vinyl records, cameras, audio gear ect. because that will drive prices up like crazy. i dont think that would happen though because it takes a much higher level of knowledge to build a dos or win95 gaming pc then putting a vinyl record on a turntable.

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-04-12, 05:39:

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-04-12, 02:45:

Horun wrote on 2024-04-12, 02:38:

Until 2 years ago it was not hard finding mid 1990 to mid 2000's parts or computers for reasonable in my area, then last year it became increasingly hard and now near impossible or way over priced.

I think perhaps the Covid lockdowns had a hand in this, people with a ton of free time and cash to throw at building that retr0 rig from their childhood, higher demand drove prices higher and a lot of the kit around got bought up, now the lockdowns are over we are dealing with the economic fallout from that which has driven prices higher again along with crazy inflation, higher postage and import costs due to backed up shipping.

I have a feeling its going to be a good number of years before prices head back to where they were before Covid, assuming the world doesn't do something stupid like have a huge war.

the problem is that these parts are only gonna get rarer and rarer driving cost up slowly but surely. hopfully old computer hardware doesnt become a more mainstream hobby like vinyl records, cameras, audio gear ect. because that will drive prices up like crazy. i dont think that would happen though because it takes a much higher level of knowledge to build a dos or win95 gaming pc then putting a vinyl record on a turntable.

I dont know .. them Vinyl heads can be pretty damn crazy about bits they dont know how to use. Can be the same for Retro PC parts and collectors snapping up parts because of the perceived future value.

If you can dedicate your life to trolling Value Village you might find something rare. They buy unpaid storage bays from auction and sometimes a retro box pops up. Unfortunately everything is getting rarer, and layman wiser of their wares.

Another way is figure out the used sites/papers/sources in your area and troll them like you're trying to win. Check them all hours of the day. I moved quickly and got lots of crazy stuff. One woman asked what are you going to do with this tower? I said I'm to remove the parts I want to keep and take rest to the recycler. She said perfect and I got a Geforce 256.

Not too long ago I was dropping off a carcass of a tower at the recyclers and saw another tower in the bin flashing an i7 sticker. There was nobody around so I walked out with the i7. Came in with another load but the recycling engineers were back so I just left and commented on the boxed RX 580 video card that was also being thrown away in the bin. Ridiculous.

All the old stuff not in collectors' hands has been recycled around here. You also have the problem of parts just going bad from bad storage conditions and people who do sell wanting top dollar (eBay).

Places like goodwill have their own eBay accounts for electronics.

Craigslist only has more recent overpriced dells and "gaming" systems.

Freecycle is dead.

Unknown_K summarised it pretty well

As e-waste facilities grew and general recycling became more prevalent there was also a growth in online selling. the result is that the stuff for free is becoming an ever smaller proportion of the total stuff being discarded, being squeezed out.

the flow of things to e-waste is enormous but it seems very rare for people to be able to rescue any of it, a lot of the time it seems very much a 'closed shop'

meanwhile things from the 32bit era are becoming more and more rare, inevitably, and so are less likely to show up anywhere as time goes by (except ebay where there always seems to be something, if willing to pay more for it)

"Quite a bit…"

The dump pays (maybe 4 €, max 4 times/year, in the form of a discount on the yearly garbage tax) if you take large appliances and electronics there on your own which pretty much killed the free (unwiped) PCs and monitors outside the bins…

[Not a thing at a tourist town along the coast where we have an house, but basically no market for computers there - I posted the windows of the local computer shop about a year ago - and interesting (real glass) TVs often get vandalized before I can grab them!]

Then we have at least 3 major classified sites, quite friendly to sellers and buyers alike (good value but always optional own brand shipping+insurance, no fees for a non-sponsored ad) so everyone can get to play scalper 😁

And indeed we get some interesting ads, like a wall of maybe 70 towers with a title like "286 386 486 Pentium 1 2 3 4" with zero further details or prices, but few and very far from here - closest old PCs are 286 laptops for 80+ eurobux, ehhhh

Finally we have electronics fairs, the more commercial kind (Forlì, Montichiari, Bologna, etc) with little to no retro presence (but sometimes you get nice surprises like a seller with maybe 20 PCI graphics cards and 20 ISA sound cards, guess of course what I'm still looking for…)
and the more C2C markets like Marzaglia (mainly about radio, ham and ordinary, but welcoming certain kinds of "off topic", like old computers but not disks, very fair entry fees even for sellers) — as above, you can find something and more than in those categories, but I suspect it's not what it once was 🙁

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-04-11, 19:05:

i have a friend who has access to an ewaste through a local university and the things he finds is insane.

Same, but of course he's halfway across the country 😀 🙁

Where I'm at its close to impossible and has been the last 6 or 7 years and gateway systems use to be built here. I go 4 hours east there is a free geek and things are way more plentiful.