[Techtalk] Re: Tip for buying old hardware

[Vera Childs]

On 2/20/2003 at 11:55 PM Conor Daly wrote:
>One way to get that _cheap_ secondhand PC is to watch the small ads for a
>while:

Good idea. Another way is to shop the yard sales. My husband once got a
decent P-II (I forget what speed) for $25 at a yardsale. It was fine for
throwing different OS's on for testing purposes. The woman who was selling
it had gotten divorced, and this had been her ex-husband's machine. She
didn't know anything about it, so was just trying to get rid of it. It
still had a decent video card, harddrive, and other such parts.

Of the 5-6 desktop machines in the house, only my husband's really gets new
parts from the store. I usually get hand-me-downs from my dad or husband
(both of which like to run speedy machines, so the hand-me-downs are
usually pretty nice), and the other machines in the house have mostly come
from yard sales. Sometimes we'll get a machine that maybe has some problems
on its own, but some of the parts work great and can go into other machines
that didn't have those parts when we got them.

We've gotten monitors too, sometimes with some minor problem that is easy
to fix. Even got a nice 36" TV for the bedroom that way. :)


-Vera