My Linux box died yesterday.
Don’t cry, it led a good life.
I could rebuild it, make it stronger, faster, better than it was before. But I don’t really have that kind of time.
So I went to a pawn shop, figuring I could pick up something cheap that would run Apache and PHP. I noticed that one machine, a 2.4 ghz P4 with 40 GB drive and all that, was marked strangely low at $150. The guy said it was marked down because they didn’t have the password. “It could probably be reset by taking the battery out or something,” he said. Bios passwords are a pain, but for the price, I figured I could take the time to get around it. “Actually,” he said, “I could probably knock off another $50 because it’s been sitting there a while.” SOLD!
So I started it up and… it booted to XP! They were just missing an XP password! We knows how to deal with those, don’t we precious?
Of course that’s just to see if the previous owners left anything interesting on it before I install Linux.
good deal!
February 15, 2006 4:13pm (5 years, 11 months and 2 weeks ago)
tags:
computers
Comments
Mike
Feb 15, 2006 4:20pm
Oh… that $100 included a monitor, keyboard, mouse and power cables. Naturally, none of them match.
Feb 15, 2006 6:04pm
/me slaps his forehead in disbelief.You’d never find a deal that good at the Goodwill computer store, because they actually have some decent people there that strip down the machines and test the parts. However, they have some pricing policies that are easy to take advantage of if you know what to look for (such as all 19” CRT monitors costing the same price, even if they use Sony Trinitron technology).
I guess it never occurred to the pawn shop to sell the monitor separately, or even hire somebody to try to reset the password.
I need to go to a pawn shop now…
Feb 15, 2006 7:20pm
They had a 500 mhz machine sitting next to it, priced $200. It looked better (before I cleaned this one up), and I suppose seemed more marketable to them.
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