Wow, why would anyone give that away for free.. SMH..

appiah4 wrote on 2026-06-18, 05:19:

Wow, why would anyone give that away for free.. SMH..

Places like San Fran might as well be on another planet, like EEVBlog Dave's commercial building dumpster https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5PdouZJDUE&l … nxCJNjwMVvpDkv8
latest:
free imacs and nikon D60 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGyHTFXEtzg
free NUCs and monitors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEXKHmJmVBY
free laptops https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2pSjOrc6Es

Places like San Fran might as well be on another planet

Yeah! Even bread laying around just for free...

Today was a good day for dumpster diving down the office. Somebody retired an ancient Cisco PIX firewall. And something about the way it looked screamed "off the shelf PC hardware" to me. Couple of screws later and I was right:

- Intel SE440BX-2. Sadly no Yamaha audio, otherwise in pristine condition.
- P2-350
- 2x 16MB PC100 DIMMs
- 2x Intel EtherExpress Pro/100+ PCI 10/100Mb NICs
- Teac FD-235HF 3.5" FDD (with black bezel)
- Sunpower SAX-6250 250W ATX PSU (25A on the +5V line, feels refreshingly solid, but it - and its caps - are still over a quarter of a century old)

And then the special sauce:
- Productivity Enhancement Products 10573-002 PCI card with Philips VMS113 security processor. Hardware acceleration of now hilariously outdated DES/3DES symmetrical cipher (deprecated since 2019, disallowed for all uses since 2023). I'm into retro networking, but can't see myself - or anyone else - ever doing anything with this beast... (some optimists on eBay are asking > USD 299 for it :') )
- Productivity Enhancement Products 10100-003B, a 16b ISA card with 4 4Mbit EEPROMS and an additional 256kb EEPROM, it is effectively a 2MB SSD with bootROM.

That last card is by far the most interesting for me. It's on TheRetroWeb, but there's no documentation other than the PROG | IO | MEM silkscreen. Still, 4 I/O options and 8 mem options should be easy enough to reverse engineer...

Apart from that it could be the core of yet another nice very late DOS - mid/late Win98 system. As if I don't already have enough of those 😉

A PIX running a P2? I had a 515e back in the mid 2010s that I upgraded the CPU, RAM and NICs on (including upgrading to 1GbE NICs), and I’m sure they were celeron PPGA chips? Socket 370 for sure, I seem to recall I put a Coppermine in it.

Look up the PIX 520.

Sadly I only got to play with dull 501's and 505 occasionally... And the 501 rebooted by tapping on it. Quite handy to see if the NVRAM is still good, otherwise not. 😉

I found an HP Envy desktop with a Core i7-8700, Geforce 1060 GPU, and 256GB Sandisk Sata SSD at the curb for trash pickup today. Stripped of RAM. Of course. I guess that's just where we are at today.

And it looks like my mother-in-law's computer is about to get sup'ed up for some serious roblox action when the kids stay at her house.

douglar wrote on 2026-07-03, 17:55:

I found an HP Envy desktop with a Core i7-8700, Geforce 1060 GPU, and 256GB Sandisk Sata SSD at the curb for trash pickup today. Stripped of RAM. Of course. I guess that's just where we are at today.

And it looks like my mother-in-law's computer is about to get sup'ed up for some serious roblox action when the kids stay at her house.

Yes. DDR4 still makes good prices on the fleamarket.
But why have they left the GF 1060 and a 256 GB SSD inside?

Disruptor wrote on 2026-07-03, 19:16:

douglar wrote on 2026-07-03, 17:55:

I found an HP Envy desktop with a Core i7-8700, Geforce 1060 GPU, and 256GB Sandisk Sata SSD at the curb for trash pickup today. Stripped of RAM. Of course. I guess that's just where we are at today.

And it looks like my mother-in-law's computer is about to get sup'ed up for some serious roblox action when the kids stay at her house.

Yes. DDR4 still makes good prices on the fleamarket.
But why have they left the GF 1060 and a 256 GB SSD inside?

Probably because it was 10 years old and they wanted something faster for gaming.

Disruptor wrote on 2026-07-03, 19:16:

douglar wrote on 2026-07-03, 17:55:

I found an HP Envy desktop with a Core i7-8700, Geforce 1060 GPU, and 256GB Sandisk Sata SSD at the curb for trash pickup today. Stripped of RAM. Of course. I guess that's just where we are at today.

And it looks like my mother-in-law's computer is about to get sup'ed up for some serious roblox action when the kids stay at her house.

Yes. DDR4 still makes good prices on the fleamarket.
But why have they left the GF 1060 and a 256 GB SSD inside?

Does it work?

Nexxen wrote on 2026-07-04, 13:26:

Disruptor wrote on 2026-07-03, 19:16:

douglar wrote on 2026-07-03, 17:55:

I found an HP Envy desktop with a Core i7-8700, Geforce 1060 GPU, and 256GB Sandisk Sata SSD at the curb for trash pickup today. Stripped of RAM. Of course. I guess that's just where we are at today.

And it looks like my mother-in-law's computer is about to get sup'ed up for some serious roblox action when the kids stay at her house.

Yes. DDR4 still makes good prices on the fleamarket.
But why have they left the GF 1060 and a 256 GB SSD inside?

Does it work?

I have not stress tested yet, but after putting some ram in the system, it boots to windows. It only had moderate amount of dust in the fans, case was clean and had no dents or scratches. I kind of regret not grabbing the 27” monitor.

Look like the motherboard might take DDR3 of some sort too.

Just looks like those slots are a different color. It’s an HP “Berks” motherboard

Today's Craigslist freebie is a Gigabyte UD 750GM power supply. It's a Korean market one, and the person who gave it away thought that it would only work with 240 volt outlets. It has a sticker on it that says "200-240V-10-6A-60-50 Hz for Korea use only." In the original box with all of the cables. Searches indicated that it ought to work fine with 120 volt outlets, and my power supply tester shows all voltage within normal range, though it does beep because the power good is only 80MS, but that is apparently not a serious issue?