DUmpster diving is my favorite passtime. I have found macbooks in direpair and fixed them up and sold them, books, CD's, a server once, but all sorts of stuff nonetheless.
What have you guys found?
Bulma's panties.
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I wish I could find anything to be honest. Never once have I found any tech that I could salvage.
Not sure if its just where I live (Pittsburgh), but I can't seem to find old tech anywhere, whether it be from goodwill or tech recycling places or whatever.
In my area in Australia, employees are ordered to deliberately smash electrical items prior to putting the item into a dumpster / skip so people can't use them.
In most cases specialist electrical recyclers are contracted to remove items, and are given priority in removal.
Few working monitors, A big screen TV that the sound wasn't working, took like 10 minutes to fix that one. Skatebord, stack of IDE hard drives with the jumper set wrong. Made a bike out of old parts from behind a bike shop. I had the frame but the dumpster had the rest, except the chain.
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I smashed about 10 HDD's for my old work a few years back. Well actually... i smashed them into my server :p
Yeah, I was helping tear down a server at my moms work when it was moving and down sizing years ago and they told me I could keep anything in the boxes in the back as the stuff "didn't work". I walked off with 2 boxes full of random components and all of it worked. Stacks of DDR1, switches, 2 windows keyboards, a few hard drives, cat5 cables, a monitor, over a dozen NICs all of them dual or higher, probably 7-8 power cords, a few PSUs... I can't remeber all that I got and gave away or put in peoples computers but I probably walked out of that room wiht $4000+ worth of "Broken Parts".
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Used to, before all this tech recycling killed it off. There used to be used computer parts stores, with stacks or IBM PS/2 keyboards for 2 bucks a pop.
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Well I work at a company that does both computer repair and recycling, so I guess I do "recycle diving"?
I might have completely "legally" permanently borrowed some components/laptops from our crush cage...
It's sad to see them get crushed though...
I wish I could, I have no idea how to source old servers or servers about to be decommissioned. Do you contact companies and see if they have things to get rid of? Any tips are appreciated, I'm wanting to get a homelab started so a few servers would be amazing
It's called dumpster diving for a reason.
You go to the dumpster and jump in and look around.
I didn't know that was literal, oops.
For some reason I don't think companies would be putting servers in their bins, likely giving them away or off to the technology recycle, no?
I have found 1U dual Xeon units from like 2006 before.
Hmmmm! I'll take a peak sometime and see, no harm in going and checking it out. Thanks for the tip
Go to gamestop after they close or something. There is ALWAYS something.
Edit: PS3 server farm from dumpster diving
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Ya! Pandas.
My high school does that. Computer Services is useful like a screen door on a submarine, so I've walked out with everything from power supplies to HDDs to entire computers. They're about to throw out a bunch of "obsolete" machines, so I'll probably get 6-7 of those. By obsolete, they mean it's a dual core and has Windows XP on it. Totally would work fine if they just installed Windows 7 and added a bit of RAM, but I'm happy to profit off the bureaucratic mess.
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I did that for years and then I worked with the school and the guy I was working in on it with me.
My school's about to upgrade a bunch of their switches to fancy new Adtran ones, so I may be able to "accidentally end up with" some 10/100 and gigabit uplink managed switches, mostly Cisco and a few ProCurves. Might also get their old APs, but I really don't want any more 802.11g APs or routers lol