The opinionated ramblings and muses of a weary web victim.
Published on January 23, 2014 By Jafo In Personal Computing

I took a hole pile of 'junk' to a 'thrift shop' called Savers today....bit of a New Year's clean-up.....which entitled me to a 20% discount on anything I bought there....

I found a little desktop PC that said 'for parts only'...for $8 ....and looked inside [it's a pop-top] and said 'what the heck....can't lose...even if it's fried' [it wasn't].

So.....$6.40 later....got it home....plugged various junk in....and fired it up.

No OS .... it had been wiped [office machine].

Ah....but on the side it had a Win XP Pro label/key....

So....half an hour later.....

I now have a perfectly fine....Core 2 Duo 2.33 with 2 gig of ram...dvd/burner combo ....386meg onboard graphics... 160gig sata hd running XP Pro SP3.

 

Now, so I don't get divorced....the old P4 1.6 with 1 gig goes to God.... 


Comments (Page 1)
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on Jan 23, 2014

Add an external graphics card for a few bucks and then you can play some pretty decent games with that computer.

And a P4... I thought those went extinct 10 years ago, how did you manage for so long with such a slow computer? A P4 must be a 100 times as slow as today's modern PCs.

 

on Jan 23, 2014

GeomanNL
And a P4... I thought those went extinct 10 years ago, how did you manage for so long with such a slow computer? A P4 must be a 100 times as slow as today's modern PCs.

It's running Win 7 Ultimate [though admittedly not too quickly]...a WEI of 2.1 ...

I'll put the same on this thing...and see how it scores...

on Jan 23, 2014

the old P4 1.6 with 1 gig goes to God.

Keep it around; you never know when there'll be a cold snap and you need an extra space heater.

on Jan 23, 2014

Wow, that is a good deal. I'd give 6.40 for an XP rig.

I recently had a similar experience.

 

My local RTO shop had a Dell Inspiron One 19T for sale "as is" for 50.00. Guy said it boots to a black screen with white letters and wouldn't go any further. Windows 7.

I figure, what the hey, it has a 500 GB HDD in it, worth the 50, so I took it home, ran a repair install, voila! So, I put 8.1 on it, to use the touchscreen capability, and.....

 

I now have a 19" touchscreen AIO PC with Windows 8.1. I took the 500 GB HDD out and added an SSD I had spare. Nice little rig.

Pentium Dual Core E5400 2.70   4 GB ram.

 

But, in doing so, I managed to get the screen in a bind, I guess. When I got this thing, it had one black pixel that I could live with. Now, after my opening it up, it has a 1 pixel blue line running vertically where the one black pixel is. All in all, still a good PC for 50.00.

on Jan 23, 2014

A "hole" pile? Kind of a contradiction in terms, wouldn't you say? hahahaha 

on Jan 23, 2014

BoXXi

A "hole" pile? Kind of a contradiction in terms, wouldn't you say? hahahaha 

Bollocks! ....[as you lot like to say]....

 

Got on a website for CPU benchmarking .... just to see how it compared.

The old one that'll go to God....

136

Terry's P4 [my previous machine]

361

This el cheapo...

1494

My current rig...

5008

My laptop [it's newer]...

7506

 

It's 4 times 'better' than my old computer....definitely worth 6.40 ....

on Jan 23, 2014

What program do you use to benchmark Jafo? Do you have a link? Thanks!

on Jan 23, 2014

Bollocks! ....[as you lot like to say]

on Jan 23, 2014

Ain't nothng wrong with that! I paid $20 for my XP rig with printer and monitor at a yard sale. Added another GB of RAM ($10)and a FX5200 AGP GFX card (free) and tossed it into a custom case (also free). It does a fine job as a media center and limited internet use (occasional browsing to WC and Skype)  There are an obscene amount of WindowBlinds to run on it...Antares looks great and most of all the old ODNT stuff behaves like it should. Long live XP. 

 

Congrats on a good score.

on Jan 23, 2014

LOL. Long live XP. I actually thought about going back to XP at one point.

on Jan 23, 2014

kona0197
I actually thought

I hope you didn't hurt yourself. That is uncharted territory for you, kona.

on Jan 23, 2014

kona0197

What program do you use to benchmark Jafo? Do you have a link? Thanks!

It's a website...listing CPUs

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php

on Jan 23, 2014

Interesting. My CPU gets a low score. Figures. Thanks Jafo!!

on Jan 23, 2014

Well...

Here I am on the $6.40 machine.....now running 7 Ultimate 64 on my old 60gig OCZ SSD.

WEI is 3.3 ....onboard vid being the issue....

5.5

5.8

3.9

3.3

5.9

Now to add a second HD for data....got a sata 250 7200 around here somewhere...

on Jan 23, 2014

Wizard1956

Ain't nothng wrong with that! I paid $20 for my XP rig with printer and monitor at a yard sale. Added another GB of RAM ($10)and a FX5200 AGP GFX card (free) and tossed it into a custom case (also free). It does a fine job as a media center and limited internet use (occasional browsing to WC and Skype)  There are an obscene amount of WindowBlinds to run on it...Antares looks great and most of all the old ODNT stuff behaves like it should. Long live XP. 

 

Congrats on a good score.

 

I recently went back to XP - besides not having the 'aero' look my pc works fine (XP was reasonably stable anyway) & I have all those old but brilliant skins from long ago. To me it is also much more user-friendly getting around explorer. Don't miss Win 7 at all.

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