[Ipg-smz] eBay vendors selling used laptops with Linux Mint installed

[Tom Henderson]

I find some of the truly oddest gear there. Some of it doesn't last 
long, and you have to be able to make a decision spontaneously. Brand 
new trainers in my size for $12.50 is a no-brainer. A used Dell system 
for my brother on a "flash sale" was a no-brainer. 8GB/i7-gen8/1TB/no 
monitor for $80 was simple; they're required to put new drives in all 
their machines as the old drives are destroyed. There was an enormous 
power supply, suitable for powering serious radio gear that I waffled 
on. They wanted $45, about 5% of its retail price. Wasn't guaranteed. 
Should've bought it. I know the guy that did, and he's mindlessly happy 
with it as it worked and had never been deployed.

There are gruesome amounts of dreck there, too. Old text books with 
moths. Dorm room art prints of Venice, twenty of them. Furniture from 
the Hoover administration. There used to be endless bicycles in various 
states of repair until they donated them to the local community bike 
project, Several of those bikes were worth >$5K, but were abandoned by 
repatriating students that didn't want to ship them to Lahore or Shenzen.

There are servers, but the problem is: no hard drives, by policy. 
There's lots of Cisco gear, but no passwords, and so must be fully reset 
and re-programmed from scratch. They use proprietary WiFi APs, so none 
of that. There are miles and furlongs of cable/cabling, audio gear 
(mixers, outdoor gear, mics, etc) but not musical instruments, save 
pianos. There's  grand and a baby grand right now; the baby grand looks 
as though it sat outside in the weather for years, a Baldwin.

If you're a hoarder, stay away. It's like a liquor store for alcoholics 
in this regard.

Tom


On 1/2/20 6:25 AM, Tom Geller via Ipg-smz wrote:
> On 2 Jan 2020, at 02:41, Tom Henderson via Ipg-smz 
> <ipg-smz at netpress.org <mailto:ipg-smz at netpress.org>> wrote:
>
>> The local university has a surplus store. It's often filled with size 
>> 18 Adidas track shoes.
>
> Oh, man, the one at the U. of Cincinnati was my favorite Thursday 
> afternoon hangout. So much great stuff... especially for lovers of 
> vintage computers. That's where I got the VT-100 dumb terminal and 300 
> baud modem that got me reliably online in 1987.
>
> ---
> Tom Geller  *  Writer & Video/journalist  * http://tomgeller.com
>        Rotterdam, The Netherlands, +31 (0)6 87071468
>             Oberlin, Ohio  *  +1-415-317-1805
>
>
>
>
>
>
-- 
Tom Henderson
ExtremeLabs, Inc.
+1 317 250 4646
Twitter: @extremelabs
Skype: extremelabsinc

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://netpress.org/pipermail/ipg-smz_netpress.org/attachments/20200102/8ad4d092/attachment.html>