@wendell I'm almost certain I live very near that place in the video. Next time you go I'd love to tag along if you'd have me.
I picked up a lenovo full desktop free from a business they were going to recycle and I upgraded it to a q9550 and 8gb ddr2 ram. also was lucky enough to change the power supply to a corsair 600 watt. i put a 250gb ssd for a boot drive and 2tb hdd for extra storage. I also put in a 560ti that I got used from reddit hardwareswap for cheap. I love these videos. Keep up the great work.
Just a strong suggestion for those adventurous people that are going rummaging in recycle depots:
Any brand, any colour, just make sure you wear protection
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Great video!
Anyone know a good surplus/recycling place in south England??
Thanks for the great videos! This brings me back to my first computer. I totally assembled it with parts, one piece at a time. Too broke to think about a new one back then. I was a blazing fast XT (8088) that ran at 4.77mhz, 8mhz in "turbo" mode. I ran a BBS from a 2 floppy disk (360k) system. Blazing fast modem too. I got the higher speed 1200kbs instead of the 300kbs. Internet was through a Unix shell from a local BBS that had internet. There was no Windows back then. I had tons of fun. Building a computer from parts can be frustrating, but it was such a great education. If you have the determination, you can do it. If you have to throw something away, or rethink your parts, just be patient with it. :) Good luck to all doing this!
J
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I didn't have desktop PC for about 6 years now ;( I've got quite good laptop from work but gamin is not good plus low on storage.
I recently found out that I have recycling center near me so I'll see what I can find there next week. Anyone from UK that have visited recycling centers around here ?
Going through a backlog of videos because I've been too busy, so I only just got to watch this. 3 thoughts :
1 ) When @wendell started out with "How much would you expect to pay for these systems", I thought for a moment that he was going to do the full Steve Ballmer.
2 ) One can tell that Wendell is enjoying this kind of stuff a lot more than being someone else's sidekick and being allowed to say the occasional one-liner or do a vid on how to recover data from broken arrays. He's smiling a LOT more than he used to.
@ryan and @kreestuh seem to be having fun too, so it looks like the TS split is working out for everyone. Well ... almost everyone.
3 ) I'm kinda surprised that your toolkit didn't include a small keyboard and mouse, a screen and some VGA and HDMI cables for said screen so you can test hardware without having to wonder if the borrowed peripherals are working.
Anyone in Texas near San Antonio have any luck.... I am trying to get an old PC for various things..... If anyone knows of a hot spot near me lemme know! I checked out a few local surplus and auction places and Nada.... Not sure how to ask the local ewaste guys with out sounding like some weirdo wanting old grungy pcs......
Anyone know of a good location in or around Kentucky?
ahhhhhhhhh must resist condom joke....
Stainless steel condoms? Wow your wife must really be scary then, but most wives that kill husbands do so by poisoning or by inciting another man to commit homicide for them, so statistically stainless steel condoms probably are of little use.
that could actually be viewed as quite brilliant.
i bet their warranty expenses are incredibly low.
Not if people leave the stickers in place. If they do that, the warranty expenses will be rather high.
nah, that's obviously the customer's fault
Anybody know any good recycling centers in the Midwest?
Found a few in the Memphis Area. Waiting on reply back if they are open to selling in small quantities and allowing me to look through their inventory. Need a dell SFF i3 or i5 for a better pfsense machine and then possibly either some decent server hardware or workstation for Freenas 10 build if the price is right.
can anyone help me for an surplus, auction or recycling center in germany/chemnitz. I want an laptop...
Went to a sign repair shops auction with a buddy for tools a while back. had the usual tons of shit in boxes everywhere shop feel to it, but they had a few computers (windows xp core 2, low end machines) though one bigger main office machine. We popped off the side to find a i7-930, gts 250, 1TB WD Black, on a nice asus motherboard. Some older xp machines were selling for $150-75 so i thought there was no way i would get the i7 for cheap, but everyone left and we outbid some guy at $75. Frankensteined my pentium build to throw parts onto that mobo, old machine was given to my sister at christmas after watching her play the sims 3 at 15fps for about two years.
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I literally joined this forum just to answer to this post.
For those of you in the UK or Australia where finding used PC parts is nearly impossible, there is another place you may want to check out...
Your local scrap metal yard.
In the UK you are allowed to visit scrapyards, browse what they have and buy it. Most scrap metal yards are taking computers and computer parts these days so you may be able to find some deals there even lower than at a recycling center because everything is bought and sold by weight. Here is my local pricing for what I purchase stuff for:
Motherboards: $5 a pound
CPU: $30 a pound. Type of CPU doesn't matter. In fact many of the newer pinless intel CPUs they will be willing to sell to you for less because they do not have as much gold content.
Power supplies: $3 a pound
RAM: $20 a pound. Type and capacity do not matter.
As long as your local yard will let you cherry pick your scrap, you can find some ridiculous deals there that are even better than recycling centers.
The only catch is not all the hardware works...
You are taking a gamble here. Not only will not all the hardware work, but you will not be able to test it. You buy your scrap and get out of their faces. The really don't want you hanging around at the facility taking up space testing equipment.
Although you would be surprised how often equipment still works.
CPUs basically always work as long as they have all their pins intact.
RAM almost always works, but sometimes the sticks are dead.
Power supplies usually work most of the time. Again following logans suggestions about how to spot a bad PSU can help you here.
Motherboards are about 50/50. The really important thing to do here is to visually inspect the board before purchase. Make sure all the pins are fully intact on an intel board, make sure there are no blown caps on the board. Make sure no part of the board looks singed or burned, make sure all the expansion solts and headers are fully intact and finally, make sure the chipset heatsink is intact. I have gotten many boards where the chipset heatsink was ripped off to salvage the aluminum, but sometimes just doing that can disturb the chipset BGA package and destroy the board. By doing the above and making sure the board looks good, you will have a far greater chance of getting a good board rather than a dead one.
From my experience going there, over 80% of the stuff I pick up still works assuming I carefully inspected it before purchase. You would be surprised how surprisingly little hardware you dig out of a bin is dead there.
But sometimes you will get dead parts, it's just going to happen. I picked up an asus LGA 775 board from the scrapyard and After checking it everything looked intact. But it still refused to POST and it kept boot looping. The good news is I sold it on craigslist for $5 and got my money back (the board weighed a pound).
Again, just another place to check out that may be worth your time. Start by looking at the smaller yards as they are more likely to sell you scrap. The bigger yards are really heavily invested in the processing industry and likely won't want to deal with you.
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