I love swap meets!

[hardwareguy]

I went to the First Saturday sale in Dallas last night just before midnight and found some cool stuff for cheap.

My haul:
Gigabyte 8IK1100 i875 board with a 3.2GHz Prescott SL7E5, stepping D0.....$20

Sonnet Encore 500MHz G4 upgrade for the old mac.....$15 new in the box with all the manuals + firmware patch.

AMI MegaRAID Elite 1600..... $20

My friends find:
Cisco 2610 router: $35
Cisco Catalyst 2924XL switch: 10 BUCKS!

[shadow]

Re: I love swap meets!

They sound like some pretty sweet bargains.
I haven't been to a swap meet in Melbourne for years and years now.

Main thing you have be wary of at swap meets where I live is that many people sell stuff for good prices but many sell stuff for ridiculous prices. Oh and there seem to be a lot of cheapo garbage stuff being sold too. Crappy flimsy mice, crappy keyboards, '2gig' USB drives that suddenly don't work when there is more than 512mb written.

I guess the moral of the story is that you have to know prices before you start buying stuff and avoid the POS stuff.

Anyway congratulations!

[NxB]

Re: I love swap meets!

The swap meets here are full of rusty tools and P1 laptops that cost $400. They are good for other stuff but not really tech.

[shadow]

Re: I love swap meets!

I think hardware guy is talking about a computer swap meet. I think what you are talking about is probably a typical 'trash and treasure' type of market.

I have been to those a lot and you are right. Nothing really tech is there. If there is, it is either way too expensive (just because you bought a PC 8 years ago for $1000 doesn't mean its worth $300-$400 now :O ) or it is just way too old to be useful.

Occasionally you can get an absolute bargain, I got a complete system with 2.8Ghz Athlon XP for $30 and a complete P4 3.0Ghz system for $25. Both working fine right now. Both had gutless power supplies that were instantly replaced for something decent. The P4 motherboard died on me randomly thou, I looked on the net and it seems to be common for that particular model, BIOS corrupted? Either way I replaced it with a really nice Intel motherboard.

[hardwareguy]

Re: I love swap meets!

Yeah, its a computer swap meet although some had other non related items. It takes place in a city parking lot under a bridge right in downtown Dallas, kinda an odd place but oh well. It opens up at 10:00pm on Friday night....but the real goodies don't arrive until around midnight.

The city charges $5 to park and bits are rented out to the vendors so the city makes money on it. The cops are there too, so we didn't have to worry about my car getting broken into.

There were a few vendors that needed a reality check....like the guy selling 512MB sticks of DDR-2 667 for $30 and the other guy wanting $40 for an 80GB hard disk.

Then there was the lady wanting $60 for a 3.0GHz P4.....I can buy a Core 2 Duo for that!

The biggest thing though was all the PIRACY! While nobody was selling obviously bootleg CD or DVD-ROMs, there was plenty of illicit preloading on machines for sale....mostly from sellers that barely spoke English. There's something amiss about Vista Ultimate and Office 2007 Ultimate on a 3 year old machine for $200.

There was also a lot of "debundling".... selling OEM discs and keys without the machine they went with. A few sellers would sell a machine and you'd have to pay extra to get the install media and COA....which the seller had VERY carefully peeled off the machine. Said sellers were more than happy to sell you just the media or just the peeled off COAs as well....a clear violation of the MS EULA. Plus, if he sold the key that went with your machine, you were SOL.

One guy about my age wanted to buy an XP disc on sale for $25..... I told him he also needed a key to install and that it was a violation of the MS license to buy without the key and the Gateway computer it was intended to go with. The seller gave me a glare that was priceless.....an expression of both fear of the law and anger in one look!