I was at a junkyard getting a few little things for my 98 Civic when I saw a partially busted computer tower sitting on the back seat of one car. I separated the mobo from the rest of the busted tower and took it home. I took the heatsink, cpu and memory out and turned the board upside down overnight to dry out. Next day, I poured some rubbing alcohol over the board, let it dry for an hour then installed the board and cpu/heatsink into a case I had gotten from the side of the road (yup) that had a dead Pentium 4 mobo in it. The case had a good 160gb hard drive and dvd burner, but the Athlon 64 mobo had defective memory so I removed it and put in some spare memory I had laying around. So far it's working fine with XP 64 bit and Linux Mint 11 installed. This makes a total of 6 working PC's I've picked up for free since the summer.
One Dell Pentium 2 system
One Dell Pentium 3 system
One Compaq Northwood-based Celeron system
One Compaq socket T Pentium 4 system
One Compaq socket 478 hyperthreaded Pentium 4 system
I guess with the proliferation of 200 dollar netbooks and almost-as-cheap desktops, people readily throw away perfectly working older PC's as soon as something simple goes wrong with them.
One Dell Pentium 2 system
One Dell Pentium 3 system
One Compaq Northwood-based Celeron system
One Compaq socket T Pentium 4 system
One Compaq socket 478 hyperthreaded Pentium 4 system
I guess with the proliferation of 200 dollar netbooks and almost-as-cheap desktops, people readily throw away perfectly working older PC's as soon as something simple goes wrong with them.
