Cheap Computers with Freedom

So today I was bored, per usual during the summer, so I finally broke down and went to go check out Weird Stuff with Fetter. Weird Stuff is a salvage electronics store, so you can't go there looking for anything specific, but we wanted to see what they had. We've been talking about checking the place out for a few weeks now, but never thought of it until after hours. It's right across the street from the dump so not really on our normal beat.

So we show up at 3:30 and browse around for an hour and play the Atari. It was a pretty cool store over-all. It wasn't anywhere near as bad as I feared it would be. One thing I was really hoping for was an old junker laptop good enough to check email, and not much else. Going camping this summer, I'm not thrilled about taking up my brand new laptop, or to go without email for 9 days. The one thing I did find there that was most tempting was the 10GB hard drives for $15. It's always nice to have an extra hard drive to swap out if I want to test some new OS.

The most interesting part, I thought, was that they had a whole pallet of counter top desktops with PIII and 256MB RAM for $50 each. That means for $65 I can set up a completely useful computer for word processing, email, web browsing, etc. (That is ignoring getting a monitor) This probably won't matter to anyone, but if someone really is desperate to get their own computer, I can hook you up. Granted it will be running Linux, but for $65, even that limitation is irrelevant. It really just means you can't run iTunes on it. (Probably couldn't run iTunes on a PIII anyways...)

On a related note, if anyone has a computer they want to get rid of, I'll take it. I've already gotten a few computers from places. If I deem them useful I'll use them. If not, I'll pick out what will be useful to me and take the rest of it down to the Smart Station. (Which is totally free, so it won't cost me anything)

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