Dumpster Diving - Amazing what some people throw out...

[chromesphere]

Picked up a pc from somebodies hardrubbish last night, looked relatively modern.  2gig patriot ram, hd3850 gpu, 2.66 core2duo cpu, so approx. 4 year old vintage.  Turned it on, boots straight into the desktop no password which is pretty funny actually   Lucky I'm not an unscrupulous individual.

Although I don't go hording every bit of crap I can find, sometimes you find something like above, a perfectly working pc being thrown out.  Its not so much the value of these things that are being thrown out that bothers me, its probably really only worth 50 dollars maybe, but the fact that this could go to a home that could use it, instead of landfill. 

What have you found that has been thrown out that had value / purpose?  Extra points for pedal or guitar related gear.

[Leevibe]

Nice score! And I love the word "hardrubbish." Definitely sounds down-under-y to US ears.

[chromesphere]

"croc's got me hard rubbish mate"

Yeah hard rubbish pick up is mainly furniture, large electronics, fridges, dead bodies, barrels full of radioactive material, etc.  I see old TV's and radios and am tempted to open them up to see if theres any mojo inside but don't want to zap myself.

[Leevibe]

If hard rubbish is where obsolete circuits live, I'll dive in too! You ought to be able to load eagle on that sucker and design more obsolete stuff.

[chromesphere]

Seriously if you chucked an SSD in there and installed win7 you could use it happily for another 5 years (excluding games of course, but then a games machine is out of date in 6 months these days).

[haveyouseenhim]

Nice score. I have been using a dumpster computer for years now.

Storage building dumpsters are a honey hole of cool stuff that still works.

[jprizz]

Old roomate of mine threw an old Fender Bassman head that didn't work into the garbage. I didn't know anything about electronics back then but I still dug it out and kept it for later. Well 10 years later I decided it was too out of my league to take on. But not wanting it to go to waste I threw it up on ebay figuring someone could maybe use some parts from it. Figured I'd get $25-$30 for it... it sold for $310!!!

[flanagan0718]

The company I work for gets rid of computers all the time. There is a rack full of towers, laptops, and projectors sitting and collecting dust. Not to mention all the cables and a couple of servers too. It's amazing how little some people care about capitol equipment. 3 years ago I took home a 50in plasma tv that they were going to throw away because it didn't have HDMI on it. Their loss my gain!

[chromesphere]

What a waste.  You can use pc's to do a lot of things beside running the latest version of windows.  A media pc, webserver, server of any kind, learn unix / Linux or install Ubuntu etc, websurfing, file server, print server, etc etc etc.  Or how about PCB design?  install Eagle or Diptrace on it, put it out in your garage for when your building a pedal., to view schematics / layouts etc.  Both pc's I picked up (there were two) had dual monitor output...A million uses for a pc that's 5-10 years old.  Not garbage...yet.

[flanagan0718]

I totally agree, I've taken home 3 computers from my work and one awesome huge Dell monitor that they were gonna throw out. One computer is plugged into my tv which is used for all my streaming, one is a hard drive housing that i back everything up to, an one is in my "lab" which i use for all of this stuff. This is the monitor, it came with a yamaha powered sub woofer too.

[muddyfox]

You guys work in the coolest places... we work all our equipment into the ground, finally sending them off to be recycled is usually a mercy kill...