best cheap/free scores 1.1

[goodpsusearch]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Very nice board. 4 ram slots.. Ati rage... I still have an all in wonder version of that card.

[Evil Lurker]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Yesterday I got a Sears Kenmore 35 pint dehumidifier from the local "convenient center". All it needed was a good cleaning inside and out and to repair the transformer on the fan. Turns out the fan was kaput because of a small 2amp rated thermal overload fuse that was located under the tape on the coil. I soldered together the two wires were it was located, lubed the shit out of the shaft, and it runs like new.

Working on a drop in heating element now. Should be awesome for a turkey frier booster. I swear I get all kinds of parts for projects. I'm building a dehydrator out of a curling rod heater set and some peltier elements and a light tower for the grill.

Who needs to buy junk when you can rig up crap that is way more functional than you can buy in the store for chump change?

[lti]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

The best thing I got out of the trash was an HP Pavilion ze1210 laptop. It came with an AMD Athlon XP-M 1400+ CPU (its performance is closer to a 1.4GHz P4 than a 1.4GHz PIII), 256MB of RAM, and the factory 20GB hard drive. The left mouse button did not work and it would not boot cold. I fixed the cold booting problem with a BIOS update, installed a 60GB hard drive, and upgraded the RAM to 768MB (the laptop wouldn't POST with the "maximum" 1GB of RAM).

Later, the touchpad stopped working (the cursor will randomly jump to one corner of the screen and get stuck there), most of the keys on the keyboard stopped working all at once, and the battery stopped charging. Finally, the hard drive suddenly developed about 400 bad sectors. It still works, but it crashes randomly and has too many problems to make it worth repairing.

[ant3202]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

I found a naked Sharp LCD panel... the panel, PSU and the small PCB with buttons.

I thought it was dead but with surprise it was working... so why not to replace the old Philips 17" CRT? This one is 1280 X 1024 against 1024 x 768 and of course... it frees a lot of space on the desk for all my trash.

I bought some aluminium bars, aluminium plates, aluminium corners... the kind of material used to repair stairs/steps... and with a drill and some screws I built the panel chassis.

Ok it is not artistic... as you can see from pics... the corners are not perfect and the screws are visible... but it is working fine since end of 2004.
The worst part is the left side, I have never found a solution for the regulation buttons I glued only a small piece of rubber on the ON/OFF button.

The funny thing is when somebody sees it... at first they don't care but after few minutes they ask me where I bought it because they say it's quite original

Ciao
Gianni

this is really damm cool!!!!

[bw1]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Just acquired a Dell PowerEdge 2650 from the side of the road.

Sounds like a jet engine, but works perfectly.
...
Heard it may be possible to lower fan noise with a firmware update. Anyone know if that's true? Won't be able to work on it for another week or so.
Good times. :3

I've implemented several of them, and spent quite a bit of time with this issue as well - never figured anything out. Find a room that noise doesn't matter in!

For the record, one with the same specs you mentioned is running Server 2008 as a Terminal Server for a small school with 20-30 users every day

[bw1]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Got another computer last Friday, again from the same condo complex where I always check the dumpsters.

This time, it was a HP Netserver E800. Specs:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport...ctID=c00069098
Actually, it's better than the specs above, because it also came with 768MB of PC133 registered RAM, a (new, LG?) DVD RW, some decent-looking Philips sound card, USB addon card, and a 256MB e-GeForce 6200 PCI card.

So, up to this point: great. But now, time for the bad news: IT STINKS!

I've got to ask - is it worth it?! I've seen sooo many PC133 computers mentioned here, and I can't for the life of me figure out why! I mean, this is registered memory and all, but still, it's ooooooooldddddd... and I'm usually the last person to say that about a computer - I drag them out forever!

[brethin]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

I've got to ask - is it worth it?! I've seen sooo many PC133 computers mentioned here, and I can't for the life of me figure out why! I mean, this is registered memory and all, but still, it's ooooooooldddddd... and I'm usually the last person to say that about a computer - I drag them out forever!

If it's free it's always worth it.

[goodpsusearch]

Intel AL440LX - Free Caps!

This very old Pentium 2 board has 7 Panasonic HFQ 2200uF 16V caps that I can use in switch mode power supplies.

HFQ series is Panasonic FC equivalent and the caps seem to be in perfect condition.

[ajcox1234]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

My best find was a Dell Dimension 3000, found in a friends neighbors dumpster after they moved out, has all Nichicon, and Rubycon caps and 5 solids by the CPU, upgraded it too a Pentium 4 HT 3.2ghz, and too 1GB of ram, no bad caps, had the original install, did the ctrl+f11 trick too reinstall the OS without the disk and with all the drivers, I am happy to get the machine, cleaned all the dust out of it. I even had to remove the front panel (I know the proper way) too clean the dust out of it as well, clean now, very fast with XP Home.
Specs:
Intel Pentium 4 HT socket 478 3.2GHZ
80GB IDE Maxtor 6L080L0 Hard Drive (no bad sectors or S.M.A.R.T. errors)
250w PSU Dell Original
1GB of DDR-400 RAM
Windows XP Home Edition SP3
Phillips 8705 DVD-RW drive IDE


Best of all, I scored an $800.00 with a 17" Dell monitor (no bad caps as well) and working, a Dell Keyboard, a Compaq mouse (both PS/2), and no speakers, so I went up too Walmart and bought some Altec Lansing speakers with a sub for $25.00 including taxes, this is my 3'rd set, one for my main PC(build a year ago), one for my Dell Dimension 4500, and one for the Dell Dimension 3000, and a pair of cheap Logitech stereo speakers without a sub for my Dell Dimension 2400. I am in love with the speed and performance of this machine, it's faster then my main PC with 4GB of DDRII and a Pentium Dual-Core CPU at 2.93GHZ, a 9800 GT and Windows 7 Home Premium, all my PC's run the same software, virus protection, internet browsers, and registry cleaners. But I know that Windows 7 uses more ram, once booted up, Windows 7 is a lot faster, but the 3000 boots XP in about 25 seconds, the Windows 7 Machine boots in about 1:30 seconds witch is still very fast, but the 3000 still boots 1:25 faster. :P

Austin Cox

[TBoneit]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

FWIW Most security forums I visit advise against registry cleaners.

I did some tests on a totally clean new windows install with different registry cleaners and they all claimed to find problems.

If Microsoft wants to install that way, maybe they aren't real errors.

[seanc]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

The only 'registry cleaner' I ever use is crap cleaner.
9 times out of 10 I have to wade in myself and tidy up/fix permissions.

[370forlife]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Comp Tech teacher bought six of these dell 1704FPT's from biddergy for cheap as non-working.

He thought it was maybe something simple like bad cables or something. They just wouldn't do anything when plugged in, no power light, nothing. I guess the price was just too good to pass up. Anyways sure enough I cracked one open to find blown capxon's.

He ordered all the new caps (all the caps on the power and logic board) and I replaced them. For doing so, he let me take two of them home. They all work now, sweet.

[momaka]

Re: Intel AL440LX - Free Caps!

This very old Pentium 2 board has 7 Panasonic HFQ 2200uF 16V caps that I can use in switch mode power supplies.

HFQ series is Panasonic FC equivalent and the caps seem to be in perfect condition.

That motherboard looks very similar to what I have in a Dell Dimension XPS R-400, except yours also has the audio (mine doesn't, but the stock Intel boards do - they have Yamaha XG audio - very good audio quality). Makes me curious what yours has.

As for the Panasonic HFQ, the 185W Lite-On in my HP Pavilion 8756C computer has those - so yes, they should be fine for use in a SMPS.

I've got to ask - is it worth it?!

I actually do agree with you in more than one ways - yes this computer wasn't worth fixing at all. I mean, economically speaking, it was a disaster - I spend a good number of hours cleaning it and fixing up it up since my last post above. If I actually had put that time in a low paying job, I could have gotten at least $100 even at minimum wage here.

But that's not the whole point of this computer...
For one thing, I don't have any other boards that have SCSI and 64-bit PCI, so I thought this would be a nice addition in case I run into a SCSI drive and someone wants their data recovered.

The 6200 GeForce video card also seems to work great (and it's PCI, so I can use it in any of my computers really).

I also always wanted to paint one of my computer cases but never really did it.
After I cleaned the case for this computer, there was still a light "sewer" smell near the rust spots. I was actually about to throw the case away, but it is a very sturdy case - on par with some of the more expensive major-brand cases. So then I decided this would be the perfect case to try it on. I had some old black spray paint in the garage anyways, so why not. Didn't really put much effort into the paint job (only about 10 to 15 minutes), and it still came out looking pretty good.
The plastics only got a soap wash, though. Might repaint them someday (or at least the front bezel anyways).

The CD drives were taken apart and cleaned as well - and good thing I did that since one of them had dead corpses of some weird bugs in one of the crevices. By the way, one of the CD drives is a 40x Teac 540E CD-ROM. I already have one of those, and it has never let me down in the last 12 years. The other is a Toshiba-Samsung DVD RW (not sure of model, but it's from 2008).

Last but not least, I got the OS running after doing a CHKDSK /R. Originally it was boot-cycling (typical behaviour of a NTFS system when anything gets corrupted). Here I learned something new: if you have a Windows 2000 CD and you use the recovery console from that, you don't have to know the admin password on that computer. Either that, or that computer doesn't have an admin password (haven't checked that yet, but I doubt it doesn't).

That's pretty much everything I did on it, more or less. It is pretty insane how much time I've spend on this thing, but I did enjoy it so why not.

For doing so, he let me take two of them home.

Not really a dumpster find, but still a great score nonetheless.

[goodpsusearch]

Re: Intel AL440LX - Free Caps!

That motherboard looks very similar to what I have in a Dell Dimension XPS R-400, except yours also has the audio (mine doesn't, but the stock Intel boards do - they have Yamaha XG audio - very good audio quality). Makes me curious what yours has.

The IC is "Yamaha Japan YMF715E-S"

[kc8adu]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

does hamvention free pile finds count?
300+ pounds of brand new industrial roller chain.think huge motorcycle chain,3 band modules for a kenwood tm-742.2m,220,and 70cm bands.wish they had left the rest of the rig there with it.most are easy(for me) to repair.
4 apc 650 ups's.and a oddball cnc control i have yet to id.
an icom 2720 in pieces in a ziploc bag.looks like everything is there.now to find out why it was taken apart!

[Per Hansson]

Re: Intel AL440LX - Free Caps!

Last but not least, I got the OS running after doing a CHKDSK /R. Originally it was boot-cycling (typical behaviour of a NTFS system when anything gets corrupted). Here I learned something new: if you have a Windows 2000 CD and you use the recovery console from that, you don't have to know the admin password on that computer. Either that, or that computer doesn't have an admin password (haven't checked that yet, but I doubt it doesn't).

FYI Windows 2000 does ask for the password.
But if it can't recognize a Windows install or I guess if the registry is corrupt then it wont ask for a password, since it wont really consider this a "real" Windows install...

You can verify that if the chkdsk run was not written in the windows event log, if it was then there was no password.
If nothing was written then it just accessed it like a normal harddrive with no OS or with an unrecognized OS on it...

[Uranium-235]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Got another computer last Friday, again from the same condo complex where I always check the dumpsters.

This time, it was a HP Netserver E800. Specs:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport...ctID=c00069098
Actually, it's better than the specs above, because it also came with 768MB of PC133 registered RAM, a (new, LG?) DVD RW, some decent-looking Philips sound card, USB addon card, and a 256MB e-GeForce 6200 PCI card.

So, up to this point: great. But now, time for the bad news: IT STINKS! and I mean literally.
When I first picked it up from next to the dumpster, it looked okay (for a freebie anyways) - the sides were missing and there was not that much dust inside. After I got it home and looked more carefully - it's another whole story.
The first thing I noticed when I opened the trunk of my car was the smell - I swear someone must have taken a shit on the thing, it just wreaks of sewer. Oh look - rust spots on the case! Maybe this thing was sitting in a sewer after all. What else, what else... Large chucks of (presumably) food and also hair - check. ... And the brown things stuck in the dust on the CPU fan - dead roaches. YIKES, I got a roach-putter! Without a second thought, I put the whole computer straight on top of my trash can.

After a bit of thinking and pocking around, though, it seemed that there were no live roaches, so I decided to clean it [thoroughly, of course].
Step 1: took everything apart (including the PSU and one of the CD drives), above the trash can, and de-dusted with a toothbrush and a fine brush
Step 2: wiped the case twice with chlorine-based wipes (at this point, though, it still smelled like shit, especially over the rust spots)
Step 3: I gave it the RAID treatment. Just like member Junk Parts here, the only RAID I've used comes in a spray can
step 4: I put the case and PSU back in the trunk of my car (hey it already smells like shit - might as well put it back in and try to neutralize it with the smell of the RAID spray). Took some of the parts (HD, RAM, motherboard, etc.) and put them in a drawer in my garage.

So that's all since then. I still haven't tested if the thing actually works or not. I think I'll give the motherboard a nice soap wash before trying anything, though (hopefully in the next few days) - it still smells a little bit.
If it works, that will be great. I have one 80 GB, 10k RPM, SCSI HD I've been wanting to use now (can't sell it or throw it away due to sensitive data on it). If all is good, maybe I'll even consider getting a pair of 900-ish MHz P3 CPUs for it. I just saw an auction the other day on ebay for $8. Should be considerably faster than my regular everyday computers (mostly P3s).

Anyone interested in pictures? I haven't taken any, but might get some later on.

a year ago my workplace (a computer repair shop) was given one of those, and it was given to me cause they can't 'sell' it. The guy later came back with the HDD cage, I thanked him soo much

one issue with this lil pedistal server is there is an I/O bug on the main ide controller. If you have a cd drive that tries to read a large, single file over about 200M or so I believe, it stops trying to read anything from it. This also probably applies to HD's too, but I had put some SCSI drives in there so that dosen't apply

but I tried to install ubuntu linux, and when it goes to the main kernel binary, which is several hundred meg, it just sat there. so, hmm. I burned a fresh disk. same thing. tried a known working cd drive, same thing. same place it stopped too. I put an IDE card in there, hooked up the original cd drive that was in the thing and it worked like a champ. I'm not sure this would apply to windows, I bet no files on the install are that big

[Toasty]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

<snip> ...an icom 2720 in pieces in a ziploc bag.looks like everything is there.now to find out why it was taken apart!

A HAM sammich!

[kc8adu]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

ROFLOL!
maybe a modern day heathkit?no mfj is closer.random partial kits.some reasembly and soldering required.

A HAM sammich!

[starmaxpc]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

was at a local electronics roundup awhile back and was just looking for a vga cable for a lcd monitor. i asked the guy if i could go and look for one he said ok. i saw a toshiba laptop sitting on top of the pile and went back and asked the guy if i could take it. he said he didnt care so i did. took it home, looked to be in really good shape, purchased the proper ac adapter on ebay for it. when i got the adapter i plugged it in and it fired up to a passworded user account, rebooted into safe mode to the admin account erased the password rebooted into windows xp home. 80 gb hd, 512 memory, cdrw+ wireless and worked great?? guy must of lost the power cord for it or forgot the password and tossed it cause it was totally dead when i grabbed it. sold it locally for $150. BONUS!!!