They should be appreciative that you're taking it off their hands and give it to you for free I think.

I wouldn't pay very much for it. If you're diligent you can probably find a business that's giving a pallet of them away for free. If they don't give them away or sell them they have to pay a junkyard/recycling center processing fees. Also, if you ask around at said junkyards, you can usually set up an arrangement with them where they contact you they find anything you specify, because again it's cheaper for them to just give it away. Schools and factories are really good places to keep an eye on if you go this route because they're notorious tech hoarders. I got offered a few older computers like Apple II's for free from a school I did IT work for because they were going to throw them out anyway. Not to mention old ISA/AGP/PCI cards they had laying around and finally cleared out and gave to me.

They would have to pay me to get that computer. But in general... what badmojo said is more than reasonable.

I would not buy it if I were you. Better get some flowers for your fiancee. Keep your woman happy until something interesting shows up. If you have to annoy her by bringing home another piece of hardware, it's got to be something cool, not regular junk.

yea i offered 5 bucks, because i can drop it at the recyclers and make 10 off of it when i make my next trip to it, they said they got offered 30 for it, and i responded "if someone is stupid enough to pay 30 for this, id take it before they realize its a bad idea"

I'm glad you only offered $5 for it, since that machine will owe you at least $20 more in repairs after having to replace capacitors on the terrible motherboards they used.

Some machines are meant for the scrappers, this is one of them.

It amazes me how many people think that their old pile of junk p4 era bottom-end pc is worth anything. Then you have some people who toss out top end p4 through Intel I series machines without a second thought.

ODwilly wrote:

It amazes me how many people think that their old pile of junk p4 era bottom-end pc is worth anything

"But I paid $2000 for this 6 years ago - it has to be worth at least 3/4 of that still, it still works!" 🤣

Agreed with $5 (or less) being reasonable for this; I'd actually be surprised if this eMachines had much in the way of expansion slots (a lot of Dell and other cheapo boxes from this era tended not to have AGP slots, cramped/poorly ventilated cases, and dreadful power supplies). It'd be more worthwhile to rip parts out of, but there's probably not even much there (CPU, RAM, maybe some drives, maybe some fans if you're lucky).

candle_86 wrote:

What would yall pay for it.

Absolutely nothing. Heck, if it were me in this situation, I wouldn't have even considered buying it at all. That being said, $5 for an '03/'04 P4 system is more than adequate. As was already mentioned, it's probably worth more for its parts than anything, even though there isn't much there to begin with. The XP COA, as you mentioned, is probably the most valuable part in the entire system, next to the drives.

Nothing. I can pick up a system like that free from the curb just by looking around. If you have a need for one right now (parts) $5 sounds OK.