Windows 10 support will be ending in less than two years and there is widespread concern about the amount of e-waste as many PCs won't be upgradable. An unofficial app seeks to help in this regard.
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).
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 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.
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.