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Garage Sale Computers 

By: Decomposed in 6TH POPE | Recommend this post (2)
Sat, 24 Jul 21 9:16 PM | 40 view(s)
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I've picked up three garage sale computers this summer, all dating from about 2012. The first ($5) readily lent itself to Windows 10, already having its 'restore to factory default' files on the hard drive. Even though it had Windows 8 to begin with, I didn't have the password and had to overwrite that OS. What I've got now is a clean Windows 10 box.

The second ($5 at the same sale) was an e-machines computer with Windows 7. I had no way to re-install the OS, so I formatted it and installed Ubuntu linux. Then I found that the graphics driver linux needs with that PC isn't available anymore, so the screen is totally unreadable. I need to buy or find a graphics card and will probably never do so. (LOL - fate works in mysterious ways. Continue reading.)

The third (free last weekend after I helped some ladies get their garage sale items including heavy furniture off their driveway before a flash rainstorm soaked it all. I wasn't looking for payment and maybe the help I gave played no role; I'll just call it karma.) had no hard drive; its owner was smarter than the owner of the other two computers. I had to buy it a drive which I did this week, from the Best Buy in Charlottesville. They had a Western Digital 2TB SATA drive for $49.99. (Hard drives have gotten that cheap... Amazing.) This was a gaming computer. That normally means that it's high end though, of course, high end in 2012 is not high end in 2021. - and it has 8 gigs of memory which is decent even by today's standards. Linux installed cleanly AFTER I removed the computer's Radeon HD6450 1GB DDR3/HDMI graphics card. Why would I want to get rid of such a nice graphics card? How about because it has no SVGA port... it's a digital graphics card. My monitor is SVGA and it needs a crappy SVGA port. ​Removing the digital graphics card allowed the computer's on-board graphics adapter to work. And it works fine with linux.

The machine has no network card, so I'll have to buy one in order to download some of the cool software that's available for free over the internet.

That leaves me with a spare digital graphics card. So I looked on Amazon and found an active DVI 24+1 to VGA adapter for $8 that SHOULD let me use it with machine #2, the one where I can't find a driver compatible with linux. I'll find out later today if it works. If it does, I'll have two linux computers and a Windows 10 computer, spending a total of $67 (the cost of the machines + a new hard drive + a video port adapter.) A cheap network card may run another $10. I'm feeling pretty good about this since, like Zimbler0, I *like* linux.




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Gold is $1,581/oz today. When it hits $2,000, it will be up 26.5%. Let's see how long that takes. - De 3/11/2013 - ANSWER: 7 Years, 5 Months


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