Your Best Secondhand PC Finds

BK_123

Golden Master
Messages
7,578
Location
Australia
Hey guys. So I on Monday I went to my local tip shop to see computers and related equipment was there. I ended up coming out with a Compaq Presario CQ3420AN Desktop for only $15. All it needed was ram and hdd and it was ready to rumble. A little whileback I also found a HP Probook 6550B Laptop for only $5 which only needed a HDD and it was ready to go and it's in such great condition, only a few scratches and marks on the lid but everywhere else is perfect.

So what are some of your best finds when it comes to hunting for second hand PC's?
 
Long ago I grabbed PCs and monitors at Goodwill for $9.98 each. Put together the good parts and made working systems.

Sold them for $100-$150 each. It was good business for a while then everybody got the same idea and fought over stuff in Goodwill.

I got out of it. People are ridiculous. :lol:
 
I bought an Apple powerbook 3400c at a yard sale for $1.50 and sold it on ebay for I think $100.
 
Last month I picked up two Lenovo ThinkPad T410's for only $70. They work fine, didn't have chargers but found a cheap one locally but one has a faulty charging port which I'm hoping to get fixed.
 
I found a couple newish systems sitting on the curb among a bunch of broken furniture for curbside bulk trash pickup and cleaned up the better one, removed all the personal information like tax info, ss numbers names and birthdays, photos and email account info and added another hdd and upgraded it to windows 10 pro and gave it to my daughters friend who didn't have a computer. It was an HP Pavillion with the pocket drive and personal media drive. I also installed a few games she wanted to play that we had for her.
She was happy to get it.
 
Way back in the nineties, I bought a machine off this guy for $150-- he paid someone top dollar to build a bleeding-edge machine for him (and it was), but it wouldn't work right for him-- always locking up and trashing his data.

Turned out, whomever assembled the machine didn't set up the BIOS correctly: wrong drive parameters causing the entire problem. Stupid thing was, not only did the drive come with a booklet outlining the correct parameters to use, but the BIOS had an auto-detect feature that would have done it for them.

I got a $1500 machine for a tenth the price, and it lasted me several years...
 
I used to work at Olin Mills (the photography studio company) on their help desk. I was there when Lifetouch bought them out and then shut it down. I got some good deals from my boss in that process.

Let's see... Dell PowerEdge 1600 w/dual Xeons 1GHz and five SCSI drives for $10. One free Dell laptop and another for $10. A Dell Optiplex 330, another Optiplex (don't remember then number) ended up in my trunk somehow. At the very end we had to put all the name-brand computers on pallets to ship to the new owners but they were trashing all the computers that had been built in-house so I scavenged loads of parts, like PSUs (all Antec, all 500W or better), hard drives (lots of first gen Raptors), cases (again all Antec, mostly midtower and one full tower), lots of cables.
 
Best deal I ever got was about 10 years ago. A buddy of mine had a UPS that was about 3 years old and when his family moved to another house, nothing was disconnected from it. It sat for a couple of weeks before the guy plugged it in and went to set up his computer. That's when he found out that battery was dead, he tried charging it but no go. He gave up and went and bought a brand new UPS. He gave me the old one. I opened the UPS and pulled the battery, hooked it up to a car battery charger and charged the battery. Put it back in the UPS and it worked great. Buddy liked the old one better than the one he bought so traded me straight across the new for the old.So I wound up with a brand new UPS for free.
 
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