south UK its hard to find anything, mainly core2duo era boards on gumtree, people are asking £50-80 for that you could pick up a few years ago for like £2, best deal i got was a socket 7 pc with an asus sp97-xv for £2 that was back in 2018, those boards are now going for £300-400 on ebay.🤣

a few months back i picked up an 1155 socket pc of gumtree, antec 900 case/asus p8p67 pro/i5 2500k/gainward gtx460 for £20, he priced it for the case everything else was a bonus. also got 4x8gb sticks of corsair vengeance also for £20 from the same seller.

15-20 years ago i'd go to my local recycling centre and you could find anything for peanuts, i'd regularly pick up 3 pcs at a time and stack them on the back of my motorbike it was usually pentium 1-3's, then around 2010 local e-waste companies struck a deal with the council to recycle everything, which they probably crush down for precious metals, and your no longer allowed to touch anything, such a waste especially when most parts are worth more than their gold content

they should at least let people have their pick first, to this day im still seething.

Most old computer stuff here gets recycled to retrieve precious metals, which in a way is good for the environment, but makes it hard to find anything useful in the junkyards. Some local repair & resell companies have dibs on interesting stuff, but they mostly pick household equipment that they understand to repair if needed. The local thrift stores are mostly reselling online, both HiFi and computer parts, only simpler things like cables can be found in the shops. For games, the thrift stores here often don't understand that new games use one-time registrations, and the CD:s etc are usually not useful as is, but need new licenses if they work at all.

Just wait until computer controlled cars go that way...no, you can't resell a used car, have to get a brand new software license to get it to run.

(Some car radio brands are almost that way now, you can't reuse a working radio from a junkyard without taking the wreck to an authorised service station to uncouple the radio from the wreck somehow. All to prevent car thieves from reselling parts I guess.)

I've got lucky before now at the local council recycling center when the "small electricals" giant dumpster was almost full, and things recently dumped by others are in reach from the raised walkway. When dumping a bag of broken toaster etc I spotted an interesting HP system that turned out to be Socket 939 with Blu-Ray drive etc., which I took away in the bag I'd just emptied. Generally though, they're strict about not taking stuff away, and PCs never get put in the "resale container", which often has working TVs etc but presumably they run scared re: data protection etc.

DudeFace wrote on 2025-01-23, 15:19:

south UK its hard to find anything

In the UK I had good luck with
https://www.freecycle.org
https://ilovefreegle.org

With the endless march of time the hardware is becoming more modern but few times of year CRT monitors will still come up, as well as beige PC's.

chinny22 wrote on 2025-01-23, 23:20:

In the UK I had good luck with https://www.freecycle.org https://ilovefreegle.org […]
Show full quote

DudeFace wrote on 2025-01-23, 15:19:

south UK its hard to find anything

In the UK I had good luck with
https://www.freecycle.org
https://ilovefreegle.org

With the endless march of time the hardware is becoming more modern but few times of year CRT monitors will still come up, as well as beige PC's.

Cheers 😀 ill keep an eye on these, hopefully i can find a decent CRT, regret throwing out my trinitron 15yrs ago, havent seen a crt monitor since.

Freecycle and Freegle where I am (Northampton, UK) rarely has anything computer related any more. I used to get quite a few old systems and parts off them, but it's been a couple of years now. Not that I have any more free floor space until I fix the leaks in my garage and build a workshop (even then, I think I'm too old and unwell to grow my collection any more! I do want to though 😀 )

The computer recycling center in my area (RE-PC Seattle) carries a good selection of old computers and hardware for them, though the prices are hit or miss most of the time. For sought-after items like 3dfx graphics cards, complete vintage computers (with the monitor, keyboard, and mouse included), and Apple computers, they tend to use eBay as a reference for pricing, so a lot of the time it tends to be pretty pricey. On the flip side, I could understand that they're doing this to prevent people from buying something for cheap from them and reselling it online to make a quick buck. You can still find good deals there if you know where to look and ideally are open to purchasing lesser known alternatives to sought-after hardware.

I've been having a bit more luck in my neck of the woods.

People are slowly responding to my ads who just want to see what they have taken away, and I'm happy to oblige. Haven't got anything particularly spectacular as of yet, but it's all useful, and I'm keeping it all out of a landfill.

I'm getting enough to keep me occupied anyway!

I'm actually kind of shocked, I guess it just took time for people to see my ads. 😀

About a few days ago, I saw a Bondwell B310 in a display case at a thrift store for $30. I bought it the next day, brought it inside, and tested it. I figured the display was having issues and upon further inspection (as always), 2 leaked capacitors (LongLife brand) and after replacing every capacitor (I do full recaps to make it last another 10-20 years), the display works and for $30, I can't complain. Just wish I could do a forelight or a backlight on the display since it's only a contrast slider and no light and if they made an IPS display for this laptop, I would be in paradise. That and finding a parallel sound card would be cool as well so I can play some DOS games on this cute monochrome laptop display. It has CGA out, but I need to make an adapter to connect it to my PVM-9L1 or in the future, the Sharp 13L-M100B once I RGB mod it via either a 9-pin serial cable with all of the pins so I can wire R, G, B, H/V, and ground (and possibly I if that can be tapped into the RGB signal) di-rectly to either set.

Depends on what you are looking for and how much you are willing to travel to get it. Shipping is always risky and it depends on the seller to pack things properly so it ends up in disaster too many times. It's a life skill most people simply don't have or don't care about. Buying appropriate size boxes and packaging material? Nah, these crumpled up newspapers will do just fine in the moldy old box I found in the basement! Carriers are also getting much worse because they are overworking people so they simply don't have time to bother with individual packages. In other words I wouldn't trust them to deliver a steel cube intact let alone a fragile monitor or a mainboard.
With that out of the way, we have plenty of options on our local auction sites. Marketplace and similar sources are also available.
People usually go through phases when it comes to money pit hobbies that also consume a ton of space so the cycle of hardware is always continuous. People get interested in the hobby, collect stuff, run out of space eventually, get bored of the hobby, have an epiphany, sell everything, choose another hobby to fill the void.
Aside from a few niche items I haven't seen any price increase here in the past 5 years. Money is tight so people are not willing to spend that much on e-waste, certainly not ebay prices that are adjusted to higher wages anyway.

I had an annoying opportunity several months ago at work they were doing a clear out at our depot with lots of vintage computers and screens had my eye on 2 towers and two screens I enquired if I could have them or purchase them the depot manager couldn’t sign off on it and told me to contact the IT department so I did that but they couldn’t either everything was to be returned they would reuse what was useable and everything else was ewaste.
Our company has a policy that that employees are not allowed to take, purchase or sell any company owned items even if they were in a skip or to be thrown out if you take it at any stage it’s theft and you lose your job they give you no opportunity to acquire these things legally.

Greywolf1 wrote on 2025-01-28, 08:35:

I had an annoying opportunity several months ago at work they were doing a clear out...

I've been in similar situations. What I've done is swap out hardware with dead or at least less interesting hardware from home.
As long as whoever is doing the clear out has something they can send to the recycler's so the numbers match they may turn a blind eye to the switch.

And sometimes I find its best not to ask.
I was doing I.T. work in a remote office that had an old dual P2 server making a whole lot of noise and nothing else as the only cable plugged in was the power cable.
It must of been decommissioned years ago and forgotten about, and the shop staff turned it on whenever there was a power cut not knowing what it was or did.
I asked if I could take it away and the shop manager said sure! but thought I should check with the I.T. manager in head office who said "no just leave it"

You could tell he just wasn't interested in the extra hassle, it was far away not causing any problems, just ignore it.
I gave it a month and thought screw it and went back telling the shop manager I was here to remove the server, smile on her face I think she knew it wasn't an official visit but said no problem.

It's true you can't save them all but does pay to read the situation

Yeah I’ve done some technical management to acquire working parts and additional memory for my non working ones

theelf wrote on 2024-04-11, 23:17:

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

Thats surprising as I hardly see any listings from Spain on ebay. Probably many hoaders there as well 😁.

stealthjoe wrote on 2025-01-30, 12:59:

theelf wrote on 2024-04-11, 23:17:

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

Thats surprising as I hardly see any listings from Spain on ebay. Probably many hoaders there as well 😁.

We dont use ebay much here, and sincerely really I dont know anybody that use ebay for retro stuff

Here in spain we have a website/app called wallapop, is what we use