best cheap/free scores 1.1

[clearchris]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Laser printers tend to be easy to troubleshoot. If its the drum, you can often tell by looking at it. The laser writes the page on the drum (changes the charge), then the drum picks up the toner, transfers to the paper, then the erase light wipes the charge from the drum.

Make sure the toner is distributed evenly in the cartridge, toner shifts when you transport it.

[kc8adu]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

just got a bunch of fixable stuff from a house with minor smoke damage.
2 32" panasonic lcd tv's,an older pioneer elite reciever,a nice new recliner with heat and massage,and 2 dead pc's that were all replaced by insurance.my neighbor already took the recliner to deodorise it for me.probably ozone machine.sold the tv's to friends after wiping down with windex and noting they have a slight fire smell.
yes this stuff was dumpster bound and a large rolloff was on site.fire started in a ford f150 in the attached garage.surprised the fire did not extend to the attic/roof area.

[SteveNielsen]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

I've scored so many things from dumpsters and trash and recycling piles over the years I can't remember all of it. When I lived in a university town I'd go with a friend in my truck and cruise all the dumpters/piles outside dorms and boarding/frat/sorority houses at the end of each school year. So many TVs, stereos, speakers, boomboxes, VCRs, vacuum cleaners, bicycles, furniture, kitchen appliances. Just about anything you could imagine college kids buying and tossing out after the school year.

My more recent scores just from my apartment complex here include:

JVC flat CRT 27" TV, was dropped and damaged top right corner of the case. Some strong plastic packing tape took care of that and actually doesn't look that horrible, the TV works fine.

iMac G5 desktop, has video chip issue which is on a back burner, but I got good RAM and HDD out of it.

Bissel Powerforce upright vacuum cleaner, like new.

Dirt Devil small upright vacuum cleaner, like new.

Computer workstation desk on casters. Some cosmetic damage.

PC crazy looking gaming tower with temp sensors and fan controls and flashy LED Lightening bolt crap on the front of case, with old Soyo motherboard (dead), P4 1.4GHz proc, got good RAM, HDD and PSU from it.

Dell E196FP 19" LCD, recapped inverter and is in use.

I've had more freebie things given to me lately than dumpster finds. I don't get around as much as I used to but the free stuff finds me anyway.

[Half-Saint]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Just picked up a trashed HP 6730s - broken hinges, broken plastic around the LCD and dead motherboard BUT the 320GB WD Scorpio works as well as 3GB of DDR2 RAM, optical drive and have yet to check the CPU

[momaka]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Bissel Powerforce upright vacuum cleaner, like new.

Dirt Devil small upright vacuum cleaner, like new.

The town where I go to university, you don't want to pick anything like that ^. Lots of apartments and student housing blocks have roaches around here. So that "free" may come with a hidden price of calling exterminators if not careful.

[SteveNielsen]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Yeah I hear you, we cleaned and disinfected them outside. You can never be too careful.

[coppercitycomputer]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

I dont do the dumpster so much anymore but for a number of years did ewaste stuff, untill my sources started shutting down ;-(

But my hall of fame is:

3 to 4 Core 2 Duo and Core I3 laptops.
3 to 4 Core 2 Duo Desktops Q6600 and faster.
5 to 7 42" and larger LCD & Plasma TV's.
5 to 6 Dell Power Edge Servers Dual Quad Cores 16gb Ram ect.

And orther coutless stuff.

[blasterboomer]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

just the other day i found a compaq presario sr1000 with an athlon 64, 512mb DDR, 160GB IDE hdd and HD 2400 XT. I plugged it in before even opening the case to see if it worked and it booted up to windows xp home so i farctory reset it (luckily it had the original hdd in it) and it works fine. no bad caps in it and the motherboard has rubycon caps on it. although the bestec psu has capxons so that will most likely be getting replaced soon or recapped if i have the time but it only does 300W so i might upgrade the ram to 4gb add a few more hdds and upgrade the cpu. Then use it as a server or something

[desert-rat]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

I usted to find old computers , printers , ect. more at the edge of the street , where the city will pick them up . I dont see them as much any more . I dont know if people are keeping and fixing them , or others are getting them for scrap metal . A guy gave me a 55 " lcd t.v. He had to kick his daughter out of a house for not paying rent , she kicked in the screne of a nice t.v. on the way out . I saved the p.c. boards and scraped the rest .

[momaka]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

although the bestec psu has capxons so that will most likely be getting replaced soon or recapped if i have the time but it only does 300W...

Yes, get rid of those CapXon caps, as well as any Jamicon. They are common failure parts in Bestec PSUs (and in general too), so I rarely leave them. Good thing about those Bestec power supplies is that they are not very picky about caps. Chemicon KY and KZE or Panasonic FC, FR, and FM would be perfect. Rubycon ZL* shoud also work well.

I haven't been looking through dumptsers lately. Mostly just at my friend's repair shop's trash can and gathering what I can from there. Accumulated several empty PS3 and Xbox 360 cases along with some other junk boards. Maybe useful for a "creative" project?

[Compgeke]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Picked up an Inspiron 560 for $4, unknown condition, as-is. Bad motherboard but I did get a terabyte hard drive, 8 gigs of DDR3 ram, a 2.93 GHz C2D chip and a DVD burner out of it.





Also picked up a 1963 Motorola ham radio, ex-chp for $2. No idea if it works but it's missing the outside casing (did it ever have one?), missing a couple tubes and the power cord is cut. It has a bunch of tantalum caps on the bottom so if I ever do want to see if it works I'll have to replace those as I'm sure they'll make a nice explosion when they get power.

Pictures in an imgur album: http://imgur.com/a/oMoaY

[stj]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

I want a laser printer so badly. I got a HP Color LaserJet 2550L for free, it has not empty toners, but it prints white pages... I think the drum is faulty but I can't say for sure, I know nothing about laser printers, except that they don't fail like the inkjets. I came to a point I hate inkjet printers... They always have problems when you need to print something urgently.

the drum picks up toner using a static charge,
a bad drum usually means streaks & blotches of toner on the pape.
also, every colour laser i'v seen has a seperate drum for each colour.

i suspect you have no static charge because the high-voltage invertor has failed.
search sites about servicing or repairing photocopiers for lots of info about high-voltage static generators.

[momaka]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

^ could also be mirror scanner motor (if this model has one). See this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNgZTAZwW3I

-------------
Also...

I got a good deal several weeks ago on 5 Radeon HD3450 PCI-E video cards on ebay. They are all low-profile and use a DMS-59 connector, which is somewhat of a bummer, but the price was right too: $10 total with shipping (so $2 per card).

Turns out they are Radeon HD2400 XT . I just finally got to testing one in Windows last week. It's all good, though. According to Computer Shopper, the HD2400 XT actually does have a slightly better gaming performance over the HD3450 - at leat for older games, that is. I only tried it with Portal (1) and the average framerate was about 30-40ish IIRC. Saw it drop down to 19 in a few places only in 1 level. This is with most settings maxed out @ 1024x768, which is good enough for me. If I had more RAM in my test system (Athlon 64 3200+, ASUS 939Dual-Sata2, 640 MB of RAM), I probably could have maxed out the texture detail too.

Also, the hardware H.264 decoder on the HD2400 XT really does make a huge difference in CPU utilization, especially with Flash on YouTube. Before, I could not watch videos in 720p at all (too much stutter). Now, they play smooth for the most part. If Flash didn't hate single-threaded/single-core CPUs so much, it could be better. I only get a bit of stutter while video is loading. With 1080p it's a little worse, but it still works. This was a big "no-no" before. I bet 1080p MKV will play just fine, though.

[goodpsusearch]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

I hate flash player so much.

Btw, about that laser printer, I don't feel confident enough to try to disassemble the beast. I wish there was a way to swap the drum with a known good one and see what happens.

[stj]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

a bad mirror - or a dirty one usually trips an error code.
it does on HP4/5 anyway.
i'v got a 5m for free that had a laser-failure error-code.
all it needed was cleaning the dust off the mirrors!

imo the 5series is the best HP ever made.

[brethin]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Neighbor just dropped off 10 computers (Dell, HP, Sony) he had collected over the years. They are socket 478 P4's and newer and seem complete with hard drives etc. He wanted $20 and well I just couldn't say no even though the wife is ready to shoot me.

[ratdude747]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Scored an MPC Clientpro 424 for $25... No hdd, 17" LCD (no touchscreen ), 1GB DDR2, intel graphics, Pentium D 2.8GHz. Pretty clean too... my buddy hooked me up with a 7200.9 80GB drive and 2GB of RAM (to max it out). Unfortunately the media bay is empty (no floppy or card reader)... but at least it has both PCI mini and PCIe mini slots (one was for a wifi card, one for a TV tuner) so I can hopefully throw in a Dual band N card I have floating (or if I ever want AC + Bt 4.0, an intel 7620).

It appears to have a lot of poly caps and plenty of cooling. It also came with a hefty LiteOn brick... Also it uses AMI Bios, which makes SLIC modding decently easy...

[ratdude747]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Today was "spring cleaning curb o' thon" day at my buddy's small town... so a curbing we went...

I scored:

-charger for a drill I have that's missing the charger
-kinda beat up LA Sound S835 "800W" (actually 40W x4) amp... it needs three screw knobs replaced at the very least... may need more. It looked pretty decent inside (lots of old samwha caps though). Not like an amp I saw here that had 100 or so caps, half of which had blown (wish I could find the thread/pic). Also missing screws/tabs for power/speaker connections and the fuses (which some online sleuthing says are 2 20A's)
-Two kenwood 6" oval 3 element speakers

My buddy scored two half size cinder blocks ... he says in the past the deals are better (he got two lawn mowers (one a 1992 lawn boy) one year)... all we saw were cat pissed mattresses and furniture, rotten plywood, and dead appliances. there also was a sanyo tv with the guts removed (teaser, looked legit from a distance) and a beat up upright piano.

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Scored a dell 2709W 27" 16:10 monitor in non-working condition from ebay for 15 bucks...the lot also came with some acer 17" It was pickup only from a municipality, and in gaston county, NC....and they refused to ship it. I have contacts all over the place, and called a good buddy and asked for a favor....the next day it was picked up and on its way to me!! I told him I only wanted the 27, he can do whatever he wanted with the 17" (which was in working condition)...

Anyway, gets here, vertical stripes in the screen....so I'm thinking the worst, tab bonding issue... I took it apart and noticed the ribbon between the TCON board and the panel buffer wasn't quite in there right. I reseated the cables, and that was that!!

I have 3 of these now....hmmmm...triple config in portrait?! I'm running a pair of them landscape in the office....but dont know if I want to mess with trying to get the colors calibrated on 3...

Anyway, here she be!

[ratdude747]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Scored a dell 2709W 27" 16:10 monitor in non-working condition from ebay for 15 bucks...the lot also came with some acer 17" It was pickup only from a municipality, and in gaston county, NC....and they refused to ship it. I have contacts all over the place, and called a good buddy and asked for a favor....the next day it was picked up and on its way to me!! I told him I only wanted the 27, he can do whatever he wanted with the 17" (which was in working condition)...

Anyway, gets here, vertical stripes in the screen....so I'm thinking the worst, tab bonding issue... I took it apart and noticed the ribbon between the TCON board and the panel buffer wasn't quite in there right. I reseated the cables, and that was that!!

I have 3 of these now....hmmmm...triple config in portrait?! I'm running a pair of them landscape in the office....but dont know if I want to mess with trying to get the colors calibrated on 3...

Anyway, here she be!

Lucky bastard...