Has anyone found a high def TV by the curb yet?

A friend of mine found a Sony plasma set, but it had craters in several of the driver chips bonded to the panel so it was not repairable. I haven't come across any discarded HD stuff myself yet though.

My boss told me a long time ago he was on the way to a wedding in a fancy car too, and picked up a TV. He was careful not to soil his tux, but he told people, that is a $100 bill.

Nowadays that $100 is like $20, and you never get it because it was thrown out because you cant get the parts.

Times, they are a changing.

I actually threw mine out due to the absolute crap they serve up on TV these days.

It only lasted on my cleanup pile for 2 hours.

I am curious also if anyone found some really good computers out by the curb also.

No, just old junk, but I did put one to use as a router/gateway which lasted for a couple years until it was replaced by a wireless router.

I've got several fairly decent PIII's and a couple of P4's that went curbside. Also have a bunch of late model PII's, 500mhz or higher that aren't too bad. Depends on where you are geographically. I live in an area where most are challenged just to flip on a light switch so servicing ANYTHING is out of the question for these clowns. (Just picked up a commerial duty Delta bench grinder off the curb. It'd gotten wet in the aftermath of Katrina and the bearings had froze. All I did was bust it down, clean and repack the bearing and presto! A 150 buck pro grinder for a couple of hours of work.) I've also gotten several 27inch color tv's off the street with nothing more wrong than a bit of water damage.(I have a large dehumidification cabinet that works great for drying out electronics) Ditto for dvd players and vcr's.( I've had to quit picking up vcr's for lack of space to store them. I've gotten 3 dvd players in just the past week. Two cyberhomes and an Apex. Lat week it was a Sony dvd/vcr combo and a nice JVC unit.) Also gotten a load of power tools in the past month. A nice Ryobi 14.4 drill kit as well as two Ryobi 12v drill sets.( All they needed was a recoring of the battery packs, I get the sub-c's for around 60 cent a battery, so it runs less than 10 bucks to rebuild each pack.) Folks around these parts are cleaning out their houses and tossing anything they can't take with them. I spend most days picking up perfectly good appliances off the curb and giving them a second life at my place.

I found a 27" Panasonic HDTV and a 38" RCA HDTV a few months ago. The RCA had a minor power supply problem, but the Panasonic has an open CRT heater. I'm actually getting a new CRT from Panasonic because it's still under parts warranty (just over a year old). The RCA was just over 3 years old and cost $4000 when new. I would expect more than 3 years for that kind of money.

No plasmas yet, but as prices fall I'm sure they'll start to show up. As boards become unavailable they will be scrapped by most shops. That's good news for people who can still do component level repairs. I suspect a large number of failures will be repairable such as power supplies and tuners. The bad part about plasmas is that the screens are very fragile and are likely to be cracked by rough handling. Andy Cuffe

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com

Where do you get the sub-Cs? I've got several cordless tools that could use them, everywhere I've found is considerably more expensive though.

I've looked inside a few of them that have failed, so far every one has had large surface mount IC's cratered and other similar issues, I'm not holding my breath on an easy fix but one may come along.

That 38" RCA was a pile of crap from the get go. No wonder it was pitched so soon.

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Not necessarily. Anything Pentium/MMX or more recent cen be pretty useful, if you've got a little imagination. It was about this time that standards were /really/ coming together so it's easy enough to swap parts from one machine into the other. Having a fair number of PCI slots makes it a fun toy.

You could use such a machine as a router like you said, or as an MP3 jukebox, for example. Or with some programming knack and a lot of free time you could automate your home.

I wouldn't run Windows on something that old, though. I'd rather try some flavour of Linux.

- NRen2k5

James Sweet wrote:

I took some "C"s from Makita NiCads to Home Depot to recycle them. I had renovated a few packs and had some dead ones to recycle. I tossed them in the recycling bin and went to leave when I noticed that there were many Makita packs like the ones I had in there. On following trips I found 2 complete Bosch packs that looked brand new except that they'd been run over, many other new packs from various manufacturers that had broken connectors and the like. Long story short, I found enough batterys and parts to make up 11 packs for my Makitas. I also have enough parts to make up 11 more. Unfortunately HD has stopped recycling and I'm eyeing the municipal recycling depot but with the spares on hand this will be years away. Richard

On Mon, 02 Jan 2006 00:12:13 GMT, James Sweet wrote:

A good retail source is Harbor Freight tools. I get the 18v battery packs for their brand of tools and bust them down.(item # 96203) They cost 9.99 per pack and have around a dozen or so sub-c nicads in them. Plenty for 12-14.4 volt packs. I also buy them by the case wholesale from a local battery supply shop. You should be able to find a jobber in your area that sells them bulk at a reasonable price.(even paying a buck a cell is cheaper than a new oem pack, they can run as much as 60 bucks.) My supplier is Jefferson battery,

. Send them an e-mail asking for a price on sub-c's. Be sure to ask for prices on both the standard generic ( 1,300mah) as well as their high density ones ( 1, 700 mah- 1,900mah.) and have them give you their prices based on volume. ( 1-5, 6-10, 24 or more etc...) Let them know up front you're in the repair business or they'll quote you retail. Still if your in a city of any size there should be a local jobber that'll offer you about the same pricing to avoid having to pay shipping. BTW, I went out Sunday night trawling for more goodies as trash pickup in my area is Monday morning and the first weekend post Christmas is the best time of the year since most are tossing those old appliances to make room for their new stuff from under the tree. I manage to get 3 really nice walk behind self propelled mowers.( two have the ohv intek motors made by Briggs.) Two dvd players, one worked perfectly and the other needs a dvdrom tray.(old cyberhome that uses a generic dvdrom like in a computer, I have a big stack gleened from tossed out computers.) Three computers, A celeron 633 fully loaded, a celeron 500 in good condition and a PII 533 with a dvd rom cd-burner and a dvd rom player max ram and a nice little 15gig 7200 drive. A black and decker worm gear 7-1/4 inch skil saw, works like new and a nice pair of Infinity speakers in good condition. 3 ways in 39 inch high boxes with a nice oak veneer. Also got a nice little commercial compressor, one that can be set up to do blow air or act as a vacumn pump.(looks like a scientific/lab model, all stainless with a nice glass jar filtration system that can be used either dry or oiled. ) A decent little electric pressure washer.(one of the small beetle bug ones with tiny wheels, like what they sell in department stores.) It's got a real nice wand and hose that will do well on the two giant TWR commercial pressure washers that I picked up a month or so ago. One has a 9hp honda motor the other a 7hp honda. Both can peel paint they're so high pressure.) I also got a really big commercial audio amp, a two channel made by a company call Audio Centron.(model# RMA2000) It blows fuses on one side but the other works fine and bench tested to 700 watts before it started to clip.( the bozo who had it before me bypassed the power on switches and cross wired the primary power inputs, L-R, R-L. That might be what's blowing fuses as the output stage components meter out as ok.) It's abitch to tote though, weighs about 70 pounds! If I can't get it working on both sides it should still make a good mono sub woofer driver. Got a couple of van loads of smal stuff as well, cd players, a television or two as well as a couple of tool boxes full of hand tools. I spent about 4 hours just going through my local neighborhood and got

5 or 6 van loads over the night.( and I do this 2 or 3 times a week! Am rapidly running out of storage room in my shop and small warehouse.)

Those older machines still have plenty of practical uses. Bear in mind that they're the only ones that'll run older peripheral hardware such as scanners and the earlier analog video capture cards. (While I've had to learn to do just about every type of work over my life my higher education is in photography and motion picture/video.) I grew up in the 50's working in my old man's electronic repair shop so have a decent background in repair even if I'm a bit dated. I use the faster PII's to do analog video capture and to run my older drum scanners that require a scsi interface, something I can't do with my win2k and later machines They also do duty in my render farm which grows a bit faster every time I pick up another PII-PIII off the street to add to rack. They also make decent web-surfing systems. My wife and I also do small press publishing and anything over a dx4 can do some aspect of the business.( I can truly multi-task as I go from one machine to another setting up jobs ranging from text editing/image editing to postscripting/ripping the final copy.) Don't write off those older systems so quickly, they still have some life in them.

Wouldn't surprise me. HDTV's look great when there is an HDTV Signal feed into them. On the contrary, the shit stains in your mother panties look better than an HDTV being fed 99.9 percent of the material available - standard definition.

There's a Toshiba 27" HDTV on Chicago Freecycle right now. I checked it out and they seem to have some power supply problems. A client of mine got a real nice Panasonic Plasma at a garage sale for cheap. It has a small nick in the screen hardly noticable. The rich neighborhoods around here have a set out day and all kinds of stuff gets set out. The Sony stereo I'm listening to right now I found in an alley. I also found a nice Onkyo that I gave away. The output fuses had blowen and the owner just put it on top of the garbage can. Richard