DesertJets From United States of America, joined Feb 2000, 7673 posts, RR: 18 Posted (3 years 7 months 3 weeks 4 days 2 hours ago) and read 1597 times:
My employer is selling old surplus PCs for 80 bucks this Friday. I saw a couple of pallet fulls of the machines.... They look to be Dell Optiplex GX 280s.... in the mini-desktop form factor. The deal includes keyboard, mouse, and monitor (LCD iirc). The surplus PCs appear to be similar to my current (and soon to be replaced machine). P4 2.8 ghz, 40gb hdd, 3.5" fdd, DVD/CD-RW, 1 gb RAM, Windows XP Pro. Don't know what if anything software wise would be included. Only downside I can see, if they are all the mini-desktops is that they have an integrated graphics card.
If it were a bit more robust I'd be tempted to make it into a gaming rig to play games that don't do so well on a laptop.
So computer experts of A.net... is it worth it for 80 bucks?
Stop drop and roll will not save you in hell. --- seen on a church marque in rural Virginia
ManuCH From Switzerland, joined Jun 2005, 2971 posts, RR: 51 Reply 1, posted (3 years 7 months 3 weeks 4 days 1 hour ago) and read 1589 times:
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For 80 bucks I would buy one. I wouldn't use it to work or do anything useful on it (those Optiplexes are a little bit on the slow side), but I would use it as a "hacking machine" to try new stuff. Like installing a new Linux distribution, run a software I wouldn't want to run on my main machine, stuff like that. Just a secondary playground machine.
But yes, if it even includes an LCD monitor, it's definitely worth $80.
Cadet57 From United States of America, joined Jul 2005, 9081 posts, RR: 34 Reply 2, posted (3 years 7 months 3 weeks 4 days 1 hour ago) and read 1587 times:
Wanna pick me up one too?
Doors open, right hand side, next stop is Springfield.
FLY2HMO From , joined Dec 1969, posts, RR: Reply 3, posted (3 years 7 months 3 weeks 4 days 1 hour ago) and read 1582 times:
Quoting ManuCH (Reply 1): (those Optiplexes are a little bit on the slow side)
Slow would be an understatement, specially for gaming.
Quoting DesertJets (Thread starter): So computer experts of A.net... is it worth it for 80 bucks?
If you're gonna just use it for browsing the interwebs, sure. But forget it if you're gonna try and do any gaming on it. And upgrading pretty much obsolete technology is not worth it at all either.
Here's a better idea: Buy 10 of them. Then part them out and sell the internals on ebay. Use that money to get a Core i7 rig
Desertjets From United States of America, joined Feb 2000, 7673 posts, RR: 18 Reply 4, posted (3 years 7 months 3 weeks 4 days 1 hour ago) and read 1576 times:
Quoting FLY2HMO (Reply 3): Quoting ManuCH (Reply 1):
(those Optiplexes are a little bit on the slow side)
Slow would be an understatement, specially for gaming.
If the surplus machines are anything like the box I have now... sluggish would be a good description. I wanted something to play games on... nothing that requries a ton of processing power. I was thinking along the lines of Sims 3, Age of Empires III. No FPS or flight sims. Frankly my laptop... a 2 year old Latitude D630 seems better suited for that stuff. Only issue is that is runs hot when pushed and the battery is wearing out fast.
Oh well... I can find better ways to spend 80 bucks.
Stop drop and roll will not save you in hell. --- seen on a church marque in rural Virginia
Pilotsmoe From United States of America, joined May 2005, 248 posts, RR: 0 Reply 7, posted (3 years 7 months 3 weeks 3 days 20 hours ago) and read 1494 times:
I just got two Dell optiplex systems the other day for free. 3ghz, 1024 ram, just need to get a bigger hard drive for them, so I can use them for fileservers. They run pretty fast with linux.
Asuflyer05 From United States of America, joined Feb 2004, 2369 posts, RR: 3 Reply 9, posted (3 years 7 months 3 weeks 2 days 19 hours ago) and read 1376 times:
DesertJets From United States of America, joined Feb 2000, 7673 posts, RR: 18 Reply 10, posted (3 years 7 months 3 weeks 2 days 2 hours ago) and read 1321 times:
Quoting Cadet57 (Reply 2): Wanna pick me up one too? biggrin
Quoting Bill142 (Reply 8): Do they still have the HDD in them? The organisation I work for removes the HDDs before selling their surplus PCs.
I got another email about this, as I must have deleted the original message, but it looks like the drives are still in them, but the drives are completely wiped. So no OS, no nothing. On the flip side it includes keyboard, mouse, and monitor.... plus all the cables.
The no OS thing is a bit of a turn off as picking up a legit copy of XP runs more than the cost of the computer. And I doubt these old Dells could run Windows 7 reasonably well. Seems the biggest limitation is hard disk size. But 80 bucks for an older 17" Dell LCD and key board isn't bad.
I think I'll pass.
Stop drop and roll will not save you in hell. --- seen on a church marque in rural Virginia
Revelation From United States of America, joined Feb 2005, 10452 posts, RR: 20 Reply 11, posted (3 years 7 months 3 weeks 2 days 2 hours ago) and read 1316 times:
Most machines of that era had XP on a 'hidden' partition. Maybe they didn't wipe that. Otherwise it should have the license info on a sticker on the outside of the box, no? If so, all you have to do is find some XP cds.
Quoting DesertJets (Reply 10): Seems the biggest limitation is hard disk size. But 80 bucks for an older 17" Dell LCD and key board isn't bad.
I'd pick one up to play with, but not for a gaming rig. The LCDs of that era were pretty slow. You'd want to put in a new video board (does it have a free slot?), add memory (does it have empty slots?) and a bigger disk, and you'd still be stuck with a relatively slow machine.
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