used computer

Try curbside on garbage day.

--sp

In the Portland, Oregon area there's Free Geek, but I don't think they go that slow or that low in price. $250 and a gig is probably the minimum.

Look for "Computer Recycling"?

why not ebay? You'd be mad to pay 100 for it.

I'd sugget "Molten Media", but suspect that you're not local.

I know a local place or two (Seattle area), but an online place to check is Newegg.com, they have a number of 'affiliate' used dealers and pretty good searching. It's unlikely you'd really want something so old it has both parallel and serial ports, though.

Off-lease machines are also widely available on auction sites (some searching might find a local item you won't have to ship), and both individuals and dealers have been known to publish their availables on Craigslist.

ebay

Many times, one can find "used" machines that are merely "open box" and find they are far cheaper than new, but really are for all intents and purposes, new.

Where are you in? If you are in the SF area, we can probably sell you some. It's not worth shipping them anywhere else and not even worth advertising them.

Every day we must throw away more compute power than existed in the world in 1970.

Isn't there some US equivalent of the UK's Morgan Computers that takes a mix of redundant and end of line kit from major players to resell.

A lot is refurbished ex corporate kit although you do run a slight risk of getting a lemon if you are not careful.

I agree it will be hard to get anything that slow or still with classic parallel/serial ports as standard these days but the price would be doable in the UK with a bit to spare for a serial/parallel card.

or more modern

You could end up spending as much on the legacy I/O as on the PC!!!

few

go

~$30 including an XP pro license, ~$18/each if you buy 20

-Lasse

Yes, anyone can.

For $100 or less, you can find something at the computah recyclers:

If you want something that's actually usable, I suggest you look for a computah refurbisher:

Most of the major brand have their own "outlet" online stores where they unload returns and tradeups.

I buy refurbished machines on eBay: There are also a few outlet stores on eBay where I spend far too much money. For example, Acer Chromebooks (refurbished): and Linksys (Belkin):

Best Buy and NewEgg resell machines refurbished by smaller dealers: Both have machines for under $100 that look reasonable.

I think it might help if you read about how to search with Google and Bing. Searching for "refurbished computer" (with the quotes) yielded

Would help a lot if you said where you're located.

You could probably find them for free on Freecycle if you have that where you live. Or on Nextdoor.

As I said in another post, Fry's has pretty close to what you're looking for, you'd have to add a parallel port header to DB25P or buy a $16 PCI-e card with serial and parallel ports.

Weird Stuff in Sunnyvale always has a lot of those types of computers but they don't ship that kind of stuff.

Contact the IT Dept. managers for the large companies in your area. (Do you go to any tech meetups? Make contacts.).

You will probably have to buy new HDD and OS licenses, though.

Whenever my company upgraded our office PCs, some old units were sold off in the company "employee store", but most were sent to computer recyclers. For security reasons, the hard-disk drives get destroyed.

-Rich S.

Presume you do not want to pay ~$50 shipping of iron.. Open the phone book and look for used computers and repair shops. You should find at least two or three even in a hick town like state capitals are. Some places may even give you a few..if you do the transport yourself. Above is based on experience here in Olympia WA.

Also..the large garbage dumpsters in apartment complexes,PROVIDING uou get permission from the manager. Make DAMN SURE it is in WRITING, SIGNED and DATED if you are in CA as there is at least one law about removing things from such devices. Dumpsters in apartment complexes are excellent sources for working vacuum cleaners; people are too goddamn lazy to empty them..Yield is about 90 percent after cleaning them out. One was more packed with dust bunnies than those dead tribbles in Star Trek.

Not too difficult even now..Pentium II-180, Compaq PreSario, old ATT&T desktops. Just takes a lot of questions ("do you know anyone that has..") and diligence. Do not expect to get any 486's however.

GoodWill gets a LOT of computers and equipment of varied vintage. Unfortunately, they have (iron-clad) contracts with recycling contractors, and those have (iron-clad) contracts with metal reclaimers in Taiwan. If you can find someone in those streams that is willing "to look the other way" for a measly one computer in the many hundreds (before they get bailed up)...

There are a few GoodWill places that do place computers on their shelf,so having a daily "look-out" may be useful.

Surplus stores may be a better choice..

Two negatives i see: (1) expensive shipping, (2) way too fast re specifications.

This goes for the US, don't know where you are.

I was looking to upgrade a lab machine from Win XP to Win 7 a while ago. I could get a copy of Win 7 for around $120. Need to add more memory to the box, probably go with a clean HD and save the XP HD just in case. Okay, looking at $150 or so.

Various places, including NewEgg, have refurbished Dell and HP machines, complete with RAM, HD, DVD, and Win 7 for around $100!

So I can spend $150 or more for just the software and ram, and be stuck with the old slower processor, or I can pay less, $100, and get an entire refurbished machine with 250Gb disk, a 3GHz E8400 Core 2 Duo,

That's an easy decision. The machine runs fine.

Spehro - used to work, then the laptop...

Hul

Spehro Pefhany wrote: