best cheap/free scores 1.1

[weirdlookinguy]

What's everyone's best dumpster find EVAR?

I'll start off with mine - two days ago, I found a mid-2000 eMachines in the dumpster at my apartments. Waited until it was dark, ran in there grabbed it ran back. Hope nobody saw . Inside was a 10 gig rubber coated Seagate drive and 160MB of PC100. They went straight into my iMac 350 as a much needed upgrade!

[kc8adu]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

42" phillips plasma.
saw the corner sticking out and got it.
easy fix too.

[370forlife]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Not my dumpster finds, but my friend who host a big local lan party found 3 52" older rear projection high def tv's in the trash, they have a certain part that burns out in them that is a little difficult to get at and is somewhat cheap. Now he has 2 of them in his BARN, and one sitting there needing a home.

[dood]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

How much to ship one to PA? :p

[weirdlookinguy]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

The HV distributor, right?

kc8, that is one hell of a find. Probably tops the rest of all our finds combined!

[Per Hansson]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Dell Precision 470 Workstation

https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=5974

[370forlife]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Thats too bad the dual core didn't work in it. I just bought a IBM Z-pro intellistation dual 604 motherboard, I wonder if that will support duals?

[bgavin]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

A real nice Schwinn 15 Speed bike. I saw it in a neighborhood dumpster, and pulled over to take a look. The owner was in the yard and said take it if I wanted it, so I bungeed it to the sissy bar on my scooter and took it home.

[momaka]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

How do you find such nice things like that? All I find is a bunch of crap that's not worth fixing or just not worth anything. Examples: Deer PSU, 285 proc with bent pins and broken 4 cm fan, RC gas engine, 2 shitty semi-broken tennis rackets, and a few other useless things.
The best thing I found was a light fixture for my room. Had a dead bulb, but worked fine after I replaced it. I'm still using it by the way.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Not my find, just a related story.

I had a ~6 month temp job in Southern California and I didn't want the drive every day so I rented a cheap apt in a sleazy neighborhood as a crash-pad.
I was on the second floor and had a balcony.
One of the neighbors like to fish a LOT.
One day he gets home and has a decent sized (maybe 16") bass in the cooler but the cooler's been in the sun too long in the back of the truck and the fish looks and smells like hell.
(I was on my balcony watching all this.)
He tells his kid to toss the fish into the dumpster.
Kid's too lazy to walk all the way and wings it from about 20 feet.
Misses.
Fish hits the dumpster and flips over onto the sidewalk about 8 feet away.
- So, 2-3 hours hours later I'm back on the balcony.
This chunky white-trash looking chick is strolling down the sidewalk in a faded tee-shirt and flip-flops.
She see's the fish and circles around it as she walks.
About 10 feet more down the sidewalk, she stops, turns around, walks back to sun dried dead fish, picks it up, puts it under her arm, and continues on her way.
~ DINNER !!!!!!!!

.

[agraham]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Hopefully for her cat... but you never know.

[UraBahn]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

As for me, best thing I can recall finding in a dumpster was a Compaq Duron 750MHz PC, which was loaded with high-capacity PC100 SDRAM's.

I also found an old P133 ATX PC that had a lot of other neat things, such as a 10gb Quantum hard drive (still working to this day) and 128MB PC100 CL2 SDRAM, stuffed into it.

I wish I found some semi-broken tennis rackets and broken fans, though.

Another thing I remember, this wasn't from a dumpster but it was neat all the same: A long time ago, me and a friend went out to some gigantic vacant lot that was a stone's throw from where we live. Place covered in junk piles. One of the junk piles had a perfectly good Radio Flyer wagon lying there, which we hooked up to our bikes and rolled home.

[bgavin]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

I got one of those 100 pound APC industrial UPS from a client who simply wanted to get rid of it. Two of us loaded it into my truck.

Another client had pallets of old Compaq workstations they were preparing to dump. We were allowed to harvest the ram and 3c905 cards from as many as we wanted, as long as we restacked the pallet. No problem. I still have that box of NIC cards.

I guess one has to be in the right place at the right time.

[Gianni]

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

[willawake]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

thats very sci-fi i am sure all the kids will want one now. i certainly do

[jpdoe]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Quite nice, Gianni.

[momaka]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

@ Gianni: I see butt joints, but who cares. It looks pretty awesome!

Update - my best dumpster find is actually an old Umax Astra 1220 SCSI scanner (though not sure if it works). Forgot I even had it. I was organizing/cleaning my closet today and I found it stacked against a wall. I think I found it back in 2002 sometime.
Had it for a quite a while, but I haven't tested it because I don't have a SCSI card. I do have a 12v adapter from my old cable modem, though. I just can't find any specs for the scanner to see the polarity orientation of the plug. Probably ground on outide, as that's the case with most devices and adapters. I saw an adapter for a similar Astra, and it said + was center on plug.
Will try it tomorrow.

[larrymoencurly]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Two Nordic Track ski machines sitting next to a 19" monitor with Trinitron picture tube.

[stevo1210]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

A client wanted to get rid of the following in 2006 as he wanted to upgrade everything to dual core technology.
1x Gigabyte GA-8iPE1000-G mobo complete with P4 3.0Ghz Prescott CPU
1x Gigabyte GA-8i848P-G mobo complete with P4 3.0Ghz Prescott CPU

And then last year I picked up a PIII 800Mhz PC with 256MB RAM, 40GB HDD, Pioneer DVR-107D DVDRW, 32MB graphics card, Microsoft keyboard and of course a 17" LG Studioworks CRT display...... this was from the block of townhouses around the corner from my place. I was walking home from school one day and I saw two women trolley these items out to the car park area of the townhouses. I waited for them to go back inside and then my brother and I ran over to the pile and picked up everything. A short while later we came back and picked up a Laserjet 5L and a DVD player and everything worked well so we were all happy, but the computer tower had bad caps, a quick an easy fix solved that issue.

And finally.... on the way to lunch about 2 years ago I also picked up an Acer Veriton 5200D ATX case which was in very good condition.

[KeriJane]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Ummmm....

I do some of the actual THROWING OUT involved in dumpster finds...

Perfectly good (and nice and clean too) stuff that I've thrown out:

CRT TVs WITH Remotes taped to the top and a "WORKS OK" sign taped to the front.

A still working (but finiky and rusty) Gas Lawnmower.

Stereo ummm... the wooden thing that holds it all together.... you know with wheels on the bottom. I kept the Stereo itself.

A too-big and dated Entertainment center. Another one of those wood things that holds your TV set and stuff.

Old P2 and P3 computers, drives carefully wiped and OS installed, all set to go and labeled "WORKS OK". CRT Monitors too.

An entire wooden FRONT PORCH (in pieces). It got adopted by those people across the street! They put it back together by THEIR House! After fixing the weak part I hope.

VCR's, DVD players, clean with remotes taped on. Instruction manuals too.

Stuff that"s GOTTA go soon, as it's driving me NUTS

That useless rotisserie Hot Dog Cooker.... guaranteed to split your hot dogs wide open

That rocking horse thing left by a previous boyfriend.... did he think that I was FIVE or something?

Those Solid Copper Zalman Heatsinks. And the Aluminum ones too. If you haven't used it in a year.....

Haaaalp! I just contracted Spring Cleaning THREE MONTHS EARLY!

Keri