chrisNova777 wrote:

like at least donate it to those in need or something.. wow.

You wouldn't believe how difficult this is! Government organisations often get tax breaks when they buy equipment, and if they donate it it must go to a registered charity otherwise they have to pay back the tax - so it's often cheaper to just dump it. If you find a charity who will take them they get so many offers they are very picky, and will usually only come to collect large lots (e.g. 30+ computers.) It's not worth their time to collect anything less than this, and they are worried about collecting too much crap that they then have to pay to have disposed of. So you then have to persuade management why you want to spend hundreds to courier worthless computers somewhere when it's free to courier them to the nearest bin.

If you sell it you have to spend time working out what the market value of the equipment is, as many company policies (particularly government again) forbid selling equipment at under market value. Most buyers want a bargain, so usually nobody is interested if you try to sell it.

If you *do* manage to advertise them at a good price and start selling them, people don't understand what they are buying so ask the most ridiculous questions, and then turn up their nose when they find out it doesn't come with Microsoft Office preinstalled or won't run the latest version of Windows (yes because if it was good enough to do that maybe we wouldn't be trying to get rid of it...) Or they take it home and try to upgrade Windows on hardware that can't take it, and then come back complaining when the machine won't boot anymore. Or contact you with endless tech support questions, despite being told there is no support for the purchase.

I have tried to sell/donate equipment from my employer before, and it's such a headache and waste of time that I am not interested in doing it anymore. We had to get rid of ten old computers late last year and one of my colleagues (in HR) was surprised that we were going to dump them so offered to organise the sale/donation for me. Three *months* later when it was finally sorted, after all the people who were interested and asked a hundred questions then changed their mind and didn't buy one, she vowed never to do that again and now understands why I wanted to dump them 😀

USA alone: 2 to 3 million tons annually. 😀

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/01/technology/ … indle.html?_r=0

PeterLI wrote:

USA alone: 2 to 3 tons annually. 😀

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/01/technology/ … indle.html?_r=0

-million- tons.
I can put 2 tons in my utility trailer.

RacoonRider wrote:

Standard Def Steve, lucky you! These netbooks are perfect for Heroes III, the 1024x600 screen fits 800x600 picture pixel per pixel, makes the game look fabulous!

What's the game on the screen?

Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure part 3. 😀

gdjacobs wrote:

I don't get why people have such a hate for netbooks. They're the perfect handy size, run browser software adequately, and I can run Munt and early 90s games in DOSBox. Good enough for on the road!

I remember trying out a few netbooks on display at Future Shop when they were popular. Windows 7 is close to unusable on 1GB of RAM, and I think that's what turned most people off. This one has 2GB of RAM (though I believe it was upgraded) and a clean install of Win7, which makes a huge difference. But even with 2GB of RAM, the old in-order Atoms such as the N470 in this unit are very slow. You can definitely feel the processor bottleneck just surfing the net in Chrome (IE is even worse). It takes Facebook a while to become fully responsive, and the scrolling is choppy. HTML5 video maxes out at 480p. Windows updates take forever and a day to install.

However, I don't intend to use this lilliputian PC for any of that. No, this is going to be my portable DOSBox rig. It handles most of my DOS games just fine. The small, low-res screen actually makes fullscreen DOS games look rather sharp. When I run DOSBox in fullscreen mode on my 27" 1440p monitor, I actually have to sit back a little because the pixels are SO HUGE! That's not a problem with the little Sony! 😀

I don't run Windows on my netbook. I figured it wasn't necessary considering what I intended it to be for.

gdjacobs wrote:

I don't run Windows on my netbook. I figured it wasn't necessary considering what I intended it to be for.

I had one of the first netbooks, an Acer Aspire One. I remember that for a while netbooks came with Linux. What happened was customers would return them straight away. They didn't know what Linux was, and the machine was unusable to them 😀

The biggest benefit of netbooks was that sub-notebooks, that cost over 3000 AUD, were a think of the past. You could soon get much better machines than a netbook, but still in 11" or 12" screen size for just a little bit more. So in that regard it was a game changer.

Technically not a dumpster find because I got them before they hit the dumpster, but I don't think I'll ever be short of 3.5" floppies again...

Now to test them all for bad sectors...

...a job for another day 😉

Malvineous wrote:

...a job for another day 😉

Might take a little longer than that unless you test in parallel.

I was thinking about setting up a PC with multiple floppy controllers, but I'm not sure whether you can put more than two in a single machine, and then I'm not sure whether the second one has to be a special type capable of working on a different I/O address.

I got a handful of USB floppies cheap but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be an option as the ufiformat program I'm using to format disks doesn't seem to be able to handle bad sectors reliably - so it'd have to be a DOS machine to do the formatting.

Malvineous wrote:

...a job for another day 😉

I'm sure you can't wait... even finding out what is stored on each and every single floppy!

I'm assuming of course that the guy who got rid of them didn't wipe them all before parting with?

Malvineous wrote:

I was thinking about setting up a PC with multiple floppy controllers

I don't think I've ever seen a machine with more than 2 floppy drives... not sure the IRQ settings would work or labelling of the drives but it'd be an interesting sight to see if you constructed a working tower of a large array of floppy drives. 🤣

I got them from a colleague at my work, on the agreement that I would wipe them before letting them go, should I ever decide to part with them. So they only contain boring office files, and I will eventually have to format/wipe them anyway which will check for bad sectors then.

I have seen a machine with four floppy drives back in the 90s, and I thought DRIVER.SYS was used to inform DOS about these extra drives. But I will admit I have no idea what type of special controller you might need.

I have recently purchased a bulk lot of 10 3.5" drives, so I guess this is going to be my next project...

chrisNova777 wrote:

im blown away by how dumb + selfish general society is. to throw away a perfectly good working computer, just because it wasnt fast enuff for whoever owned it.. or because they got a new one.... mindblowing..
like at least donate it to those in need or something.. wow.

There is a glut of Win 7 capable machines out there that people are picky about what they get for free. Those early netbooks suck for current browsing (slow CPU, slow GPU, RAM limited, low rez screens).

I have picked up a few Thinkpad T61's in the last year for pocket change and they are much better for internet use that newer netbooks.

Unknown_K wrote:

There is a glut of Win 7 capable machines out there that people are picky about what they get for free. Those early netbooks suck for current browsing (slow CPU, slow GPU, RAM limited, low rez screens).

I have picked up a few Thinkpad T61's in the last year for pocket change and they are much better for internet use that newer netbooks.

But I can't put a T61 in the front pocket of my backpack, can I?

After all the nice stuff I think it's time for some more trashy dumpster finds! It's not season for dumpster diving here as there is lots of snow outside but these parts are from a dumpstrer placed on a roofed parking lot.

The Asus Socket-A board neeeds a full recap but the Gigabyte Socket-370 board looks nice and the caps looks good exept the one cap who seemed to have taken the brunt of the impact from the fall into the dumpster. Its sad some penny-pinching douchebaggery has resulted in the ISA-slot connector being absent.

I also found this Yamaha 8x SCSI CD-writer. I rarly pick up optical units thrown in dumpsters but I bought the 6x version of this drive 18 years ago or something like that and I still have the manual so why not, perhaps it works.

Nice. The KT333 is a good, no nonsense chipset.

Skyscraper wrote:

After all the nice stuff I think it's time for some more trashy dumpster finds! It's not season for dumpster diving here as ther […]
Show full quote

After all the nice stuff I think it's time for some more trashy dumpster finds! It's not season for dumpster diving here as there is lots of snow outside but these parts are from a dumpstrer placed on a roofed parking lot.

The Asus Socket-A board neeeds a full recap but the Gigabyte Socket-370 board looks nice and the caps looks good exept the one cap who seemed to have taken the brunt of the impact from the fall into the dumpster. Its sad some penny-pinching douchebaggery has resulted in the ISA-slot connector being absent.

dumpsterfind.JPG

I also found this Yamaha 8x SCSI CD-writer. I rarly pick up optical units thrown in dumpsters but I bought the 6x version of this drive 18 years ago or something like that and I still have the manual so why not, perhaps it works.

YamahaCDR.JPG

Nice little lot you found! 😁

I really liked the ASUS A7V333 (can't remember if there were any subvariants), it was the basis of the very first ever Athlon XP system I ever build! 😁
Too bad I destroyed the board when I tried to power it up with it's CLEAR-CMOS jumper installed...magic smoke and that was it 😢
I got another one years later though! 😁
I liked it a lot 😀

Dunno about the Gigabyte board, but the Gigabyte board of roughly the same era ran perfectly fine afaic 😀

That graphics card was a bit of a surprise for me though.
At first I expected it to be a TNT2 M64 with 32MB, but those often have solder spots for the 16MB variant and M64 cards usually don't come with tv-out either, so I googled the part number and it's a GF2 MX 😀

Technically, not a dumpster find. But someone brought me a PC, asked me to retrieve all the pics and docs off of it, then do whatever I want with it. So it was destined for the dumpster as far as I'm concerned!

It is a Dell Optiplex GX270, circa 2004. Specs:
P4 2.8/512k/800 (hyperthreading disabled in BIOS)
1GB (2x512) DDR400
40GB IDE
Intel Extreme Graphics (i865)
onboard SoundMAX audio
It has some scuff marks on the outside and dust bunnies on the inside, but otherwise it is in pristine condition. And it appears to have been hardly used at all. Hardly any software on it, completely free of malware. It was so clean I just uninstalled a few apps (Adobe Reader 7, AVG, etc), deleted the user profile, ran Windows Update and it was like a freshly installed OS.

Updates done to it:
updated BIOS, then turned on Hyperthreading
replaced the RAM with 2x1024MB DDR400
imaged the drive to a 160GB SATA for more room and a little more speed
And the best part: it has an AGP 8X slot, so I finally found a home for my GeForce 6800GS AGP! Here are the christening photos: