50 Dollar Club

[brisray]

Just ask around. As soon as people I know realized that I'll take practically anything all sorts of things came to light. In 2021, someone gave me a PC that still had Windows ME on it that had been gathering dust in their basement.

Thrift stores are a bit of a gamble but decent sources are university, college and government surplus sites. Some sell them off by the pallet which is great if you want 20 or 30 old computers cluttering up your house - which you probably don't. Others sell them individually. Here's one local to me - https://www.indstate.edu/isu-auction/computers

These places get bulk pricing so they buy thousands at a time and the old ones depreciate in value pretty quickly, so they sell of old ones cheaply. One thing with these though, the drives are thoroughly wiped so there's no OS on them.

[brisray]

I knew it was unusual to still see Windows ME around I took a photo of it. It just took me a while to find it again.

98 and ME were the worst versions of Windows ever produced. Windows 98 was so bad they made 98SE (Second Edition) less than a year later.

[brisray]

Just found the other photos I took that day. I had 3 old computers lying around and took them apart the same day. Aside from the ME one there was also a 98 and something else but I can't remember what was on that one.

[brisray]

If you are serious about using or repairing old machines there's two things you absolutely need.

Recuva is free and can recover files from even a formatted drive. https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva It can recover encrypted files if the encryption key can be found. It cannot recover files from a drive that's been wiped with DBAN or something simlar because there's nothing left to recover; or where a BIOS password was used and the drive is now locked.

The other is an IDE-SATA-USB adapter which is going to cost around $20. I promise you, if you do this a lot it will be the best $20 you ever spent. Get the full kit, which comes with sets of cables for both IDE (2.5" and 3":wink: and SATA, data and power. If the old drive is still at all readable, attach it to the doodah and a USB port of a working computer.

Even if the old drive was a boot drive and needed a password, because it's not being used to boot anything, the computer just sees it as a slave and usually the most you'll see is ":grin:omg: you want to access these files?", answer "Yes", and start copying.

[Melooon]

find an old computer that can take an old fashioned Voodoo GFX card...

It definitely cost me more than $50.. but years ago I built a whole voodoo 1 system from ebay parts! It was a very fun project - I still have it stored at my parents house - but Iv haven't had the space to set it up for years

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=49534

[brisray]

That was an interesting project Melooon. And so clean looking! The old computers I get sometimes have things living in them.

An interesting observation about the noises these things make. Even with the quietest, as soon as you powered them up you could hear the fans spinning up to speed and the hard drives seeking what ever they were looking for. It was never anything to worry about except, as someone said on the project page, when something started screeching because that always meant something was about to fail and hopefully it wasn't the drive.

For most I've looked at it was nearly always the power supply that failed first. I have seen motherboards with leaking capacitors but that is rare.

A little bit of history. My first taste of programming was in the 1970s with Fortran at school. Except the school I went to did not have a single computer, not even for admin use! We wrote the programs, got taken to a local university by minibus and the programs were put on cards - "do not fold, spindle or mutilate" - on something the size of a washing machine. The programs were then run on the university's mainframe.

I had to wait until 1986 before I could afford my first new own home computer which cost me an arm and a leg. A 8086 CPU Amstrad 1640 with two 5.25" floppy drives (which I had to pay extra for), 640Kb of RAM and no hard drive. A year later I got a 32Mb hard drive for it and that cost me more than the original computer did. https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=19

[Memory]

I'm sure that some people who have visited my blog already know about this and so do you Onio since I had said it in your chatbox already weeks ago, but I post it here as a reminder or something like that.

At the beginning of December 2022 I was given an Acer Aspire 4315 laptop, with an Intel Celeron 530 CPU and 512MB of RAM. It came with Windows XP SP2 installed along with a bunch of programs and personal files from the previous owner of this laptop which I didn't give care for, apparently he has stopped using it in mid 2014 according to the latest modified files in the system. They never told me the price, they just gave it to me as a gift and that's all, so I don't know if this counts too.



Due to security issues and out of self-interest, I decided to format it and install Linux instead. I chose antiX Linux as a distribution as it is very good for low resource systems like this one. I was having some problems using the last available version of antiX (22) such as Wi-Fi disconnections when downloading or similar, so I had to downgrade to version 19.5 which is working quite well.






Something I also forgot to mention and that is that the battery drains pretty fast, it gets to last on for like 30 minutes or so and I have to be using it with a charger. And also the headphone and microphone ports don't work and I have to use one with USB instead. I currently use it for Gopher browsing with Lynx, SSH/SFTP, listening to music and playing simple and old games like Doom or ClassiCube.

[Onio]

@Gecko - that thing is sweet! I checked eBay out of curiousity, there's one for $60~ish, so it definitely fits. It makes me wonder, maybe there's a way you can get cheap parts for it to repair the issues you have - for fun, that is, if that sort of thing floats your boat. Could be an interesting learning experience.
I'm thinking about soldering more ram onto my Chromebook's motherboard, myself. 90% sure I'd mess it up, but it would be really cool if I could get it to work

[Memory]

As the hot conditions this summer are merciless to the CPUs, my Asus EeePC netbook asked for a check as well (it was shutting itself down on overheating). This 13-year-old machine hasn't been opened ever, so lots of dust got caught everywhere. Fortuneatly, everything is very accessable.
Now the netbook is back in action as my main machine since many, many years with an SSD running Salix-Linux. Nowadays, a used Eee PC costs less than 50 euros / dollars.

https://www.kleinanzeigen.de/s-notebooks/preis:10:50/asus-eee/k0c278

Definetly a worthy pick with exceptional reliability.