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So I found this Dell PC in the trash...(I'm new to hardware)

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  • Hardware
  • Dell
  • Components
Last response: in Components
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June 20, 2013 10:15:15 AM

Hi there, I started this thread last night, but nobody has really looked at it. I'm new to hardware and was really hoping to get a little more feedback.

I figure nobody looked at it since I didn't post it in a "hardware" catagory. So I'm linking to it here.

The thread is here: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-1708806/found-dell...

Please check it out. Thanks!

More about : found dell trash hardware

June 20, 2013 10:23:21 AM

In my opinion... I'd fire it up and see if you can't get it to work. People will commonly throw out a machine that is very much fixable.

Use it as your own personal media center or something :) 
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June 20, 2013 10:36:04 AM

Thanks for the feedback.

Yeah I wasn't really sure if it was bad etiquette or unsafe to fish systems out of the trash. I don't really need an extra computer (I have like 5 technically), so I just want to see what parts I can salvage and use.
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June 20, 2013 10:48:10 AM

Adrianime said:
Thanks for the feedback.

Yeah I wasn't really sure if it was bad etiquette or unsafe to fish systems out of the trash. I don't really need an extra computer (I have like 5 technically), so I just want to see what parts I can salvage and use.


Unsafe.. doubtful. Unethical... maybe debatable.. but hey they threw it out right? Now if you went and used a data recovery prog and started digging through their person files. That might be a whole other story ;) .

Fair enough. If I had found it... I'd probably just use the hdd like u planned. Sell the Ram, then toss the rest. Might keep the case and sand it down and practice painting / modding with it.
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June 20, 2013 11:01:23 AM

The only Pc I ever bought was back in 1989 so considering that I now got 15 computers and not the original one either, where do you think I got them from? YeP! The trash cans, dumptsers, side streets, and wherever people dump their unwanted computers. Discarded computers are th cheapest PC's but sometimes you gotta pay for the parts like a new PSU $50, ram @$100 per pair, video card, @$75. Sometimes you can get ram, video cards, and hdd's and other goodies but it takes a lot of collecting old PC's before you get a decent amount of parts. It took me 10 years and collecting more than 120 discard computers to find what I got now plus I had to pay for extra hardware that would total about $3000 so overall, even though I got 15 PC's I've still spent $3000 on parts for them and still only got junk... So if you need 64mb Dram, I got a heap of them for "sale", I also got lots of Pentium I CPU's, and heatsink fans for them, as well as some really old ATA hdds that are not more than 2gb in voulme. I used to have about 30 ATA hdd's with a volume of no more than 200 mb but decide to piff them, most if not all were faulty anyhow.
The older PC cases are top mounting for the PSU, I'm in a quandary about discarding them, I don't consider bottom mounted PSU as something to be totally positive about.

If you can acquire older PC's usually the hdd with the OS is still intact but the volume is rarely more than 20gb, but you can play those older games for XP and Windows 98, plenty of those games still about.
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June 24, 2013 10:38:48 AM

The DELL HDD beeped and screeched when i tried to put it in my computer. So I gave up on the idea. Haha, it was a good experiment though!
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