this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
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those sound modern and desirable to me.
maybe we can get those on the cheap and install linux on them?
They oftentimes pop up on eBay (and sometimes Newgg) for fairly cheap. I've seen many older systems like that pop up for a couple hundred bucks with pretty good specs, even by today's standards.
Look for surplus sales, many large orgs (esp. universities) have them periodically throughout the year. I got a PC for $50 years ago, and it worked, it just wasn't modern.
I recommend at least upgrading the PSU though, since the ones that have tend to suck, and consider getting a new case as well since a standard PSU may not fit and they're certainly not big enough to hold a GPU.
I recently got a $100 PC that's now an Ubuntu server running your typical qBittorrent/Xarr/Plex/VPN stack, a local web server (for accessing said services), and nginxproxymanager all across docker containers. It's not powerful by modern standards (i5-7600), but for what I use it for it's way overkill. It's currently sitting at 5% memory utilization of the 8GB of RAM it has despite running all that with many active torrents.
Nice! I still have my PC from 2009-ish (Phenom II X4) running my NAS and serving DLNA (for my smart TV), and I'm planning to downsize a bit to save on power (looking at ARM boards like RockPro64).
Older machines make for great servers.
Some friend in college in the 00s got a 4 foot high stack of 3com hubs for like 10 bucks each from the university surplus.
Did they resell them? I can't think of any other reason to buy that many...
Yeah, listed them on eBay if I recall. The also got a switch and a few other things.
I am kind of jealous of universities that are well-funded enough to upgrade their hardware. Most computers in my uni are as old as the building, running XP or 7)
I'm guessing you live in a relatively poor area?
I worked for a university's IT dept and we had a support contract with the manufacturer (HP in our case) and we'd upgrade at the end of that contract. We'd also have a common image that gets loaded on every morning, so every computer got reset every day. I assume that's how most campuses work. We'd usually run the oldest supported version of windows, because upgrading meant we'd have to rebuild the image and reverify all of our software, and we were lazy.
So every year, there would be a bunch of surplus computers, all 3-5 years old, and they'd usually go for $50, keyboard were usually $10, mice ~$5, and monitors varied (IIRC, we didn't replace them as often). They were usually pretty crappy computers though.
Used corporate laptops are readily available from numerous channels. Most buy the 3-year warranty with a planned replacement at 4 years, and there's roughly 1 cycle per year (which lines up with a new model released each year). These get sold to refurbishers and resold from there.
IOW, figure out which Dell Latitude, HP Elitebook, and Lenovo Thinkpad models were released about 5 years ago. Then head over to eBay, Amazon, Micro Center, Newegg, etc and search for that model. Be very careful on specs - many remove and destroy the SSD for data security, and that often includes the mounting bracket. There may be a wide range of options, from a 1366x768 screen to 4k, or SATA vs NVMe, etc.
It looks like you can probably get a Lenovo T470 for about $150 or so; even less if you're willing to deal with your own hardware repairs/upgrades.
They're pretty much never thrown out when decommissioned, they're mostly sold to refurbishing companies that clean them and sell them to consumers or developing countries. So it should be pretty easy to get your hands on them actually. I recently bought a thinkpad T470 for $200 with decent i5 CPU, 16gb ram and 256gb NVME.