Great story! Your laptop is lucky 😀 Here's mine:

This automn I received a bunch of "broken stuff" from a colleague for taking a look at his PC. It included an ASRock G31M-VS motherboard with LGA775 Prescott 3.0Ghz (or was it 2.8? does not matter). It came with an absolutely crashed case and 1 GB of RAM. My first thought was "It's nothing flashy, but will get the job done once I figure out what is wrong with it". It turns out, nothing was actually wrong. Or maybe something software, but the HDD was missing.

Since the case was cashed, I removed everything I found useful and got rid of it, all but motherboard mounting plate. Later an idea came and after some time I finished collecting the stuff I needed and made a Kitchen PC project - a PC to watch movies while cooking and eating, a PC to show pictures to guests and do stuff you do with computers. I bought a new 20" LCD monitor and a USB Wi-fi dongle to establish Internet connection. Later it inherited Core 2 Duo E6300 from my main PC. I'll install bigger RAM modules once I get a good deal on them...

Pictures:

Today this guy is seeing everyday use, it boots XP in some 20 seconds, is fast and reliable. It makes me happy it did not end up in the junk.

Never seen such setup, cool. What next, components hanging from the ceiling???

You watch movies while you eat? When I was a kid, my mom wouldn't even let me read magazines while I ate so I grew out of it 😀

Oh, I've got plenty of stories old computers I've found or have been given that I've fixed up. I enjoy upgrading computers beyond reason. Generally the more ridiculous, unconventional and more awesome than useful...the better. Granted I still prefer it when I can actually use it. I'll pick my top 3 favorites. Most of these I've actually used as main computers for a time, generally until I found something newer.

First up is "Dell Dimension L800r"

Cpu= 800 MHz Pentium 3 (fsb=133MHz) upgraded to 1.4 Ghz Pentium 3-S (sent away for modified cpu, had to replace BIOS)
Ram="not enough" PC133 upgraded to 512MB
Sound=a Dell oem Soundblaster or whatever..., upgraded to a Soundblaster Live
Harddisk=Seagate, about 10GB upgraded to 80GB
GPU=Integrated Intel upgraded to a Geforce 9500gt (pci...)
CD drive replaced with DVD Drive
USB 2.0 pci card
Generic Network card replaced with one of those silly Killer "NPU" things.
*how good was this thing?, I managed to surf the web pretty well on it, it flew through Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Postal 2. Pretty good for a budget 1999 machine.

Presario 4504 (probably the most harebrained one I ever did)
This thing is about as proprietary as you can get, a real pain in the but. For reference this thing is from 1996.

CPU= 200MHz Pentium upgraded to 233MHz Pentium MMX. Really frustrating, as its very picky with socket 7 cpus, refuses to recognize AMDs.
>COAST module added, 512kb of L2 memory, (was not easy to find that.)
RAM= 16MB on board upgraded to 64MB.
VRAM=1MB upgraded to 2 MB
HardDisk= 2GB "BigFoot" upgraded to a normal sized, faster, and higher capacity hard drive
Optical drive updated to CDRW
Modem Replaced with an NIC.

*How good is this thing? It could probably run Win9x games adequately if I had any...I tried to figure out how to run Arachne on it with FreeDOS...but that didn't quite work out. It's relegated to emergency word processor duty.

Dell Dimension 4600

CPU= 2.8GHz Pentium 4, upgraded to a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition.
RAM= DDR 2700, upgraded to DDR 3200 (maxed it out to 4GB)
HardDisk= didn't have one, so I put in a Velociraptor
Sound= crappy dell SBLive, upgraded to an X-Fi
GPU= Put in an AGP Radeon HD 4670 (supposed to be the best AGP can get...)
(put in a floppy drive because it felt weird to not have one)

Like many people here I have a bunch of old hardware, but most of mine doesn't do much. There are exceptions though, where some machines have found an important role. These two are the best examples of outdated, discarded machines that have found ongoing jobs for me:

I found a Pentium 75MHz laptop which I use for datalogging in a car. I think it's built better for this job than any modern laptop.

Found an old Compaq iPaQ with an i810 and Mendocino in it. It's a very skimpy SFF office machine, no expansion slots, one IDE channel, highly integrated, and a picky BIOS. Normally I wouldn't have given a crippled half-PC like this the time of day (dead battery and all that.. ba dum dum). But at that time I was in need of a minimal power 24/7 system. Brought it home and measured the power consumption and I was impressed. I'd never want to *use* the thing, but it's great for light duty unattended stuff.
It was upgraded to a low end Coppermine, because this further reduced it's power usage. I tweaked WinXP as best I could to minimize disk activity. The ancient Seagate Medalist hard drive spins down about 1/2 to 2/3 of the time. With 512MB installed it "serves" VoIP with power usage at 27W, and I think that was measured with the hard drive running. I had wanted to convert this to a CF card, but I never finished that project. It was held up by me trying to figure out the remaining sources of disk activity. But it's been doing the job for a couple years now, no problems.

I usually sell computers that are obsolete. I did however buy a Lenovo ThinkCentre really cheap recently to be a print server. It is cheaper to buy one of this with Windows 7 already installed. 😀 In a way this computer got a second chance as it was refurbished.

chinny22 wrote:

Once back in London I stayed at my girlfriend’s managed accommodation. Internet was included for 1 device but you paid extra if you wanted more. I tried a few things like registering a router as the device but they detected that, fine how about 1 laptop…that happens to be running Windows 2003 Terminal server, Now we could both use the internet at the same time for basic browsing which is all we were doing most the time anyway.

Or you can just create an ad hoc network over the wi-fi of the laptop that is directly connected to the internet. I have a computer in my cellar that connects through wi-fi to my machine upstairs and then passes the connection over ethernet to other machines in the cellar. Since only one machine is directly connected, that's the only machine that is seen by the outside world.

*How good is this thing? It could probably run Win9x games adequately if I had any...I tried to figure out how to run Arachne on it with FreeDOS...but that didn't quite work out. It's relegated to emergency word processor duty.

Arachne has next to no CSS support so it is pretty terrible. I would just put 9X on it and run Opera 9.6.
It will run it fine on average sites.

Alright, my story is only partially about a whole PC, but bear with me.

When I was at university, in one of my jobs to pay the bills my boss had the Idea, that we needed a PC in the office. Now, you can tell that that must have been some years in the past.
We searched local newspapers for listings of used computers, since budget was really not that high. We found a used 486 that hat been phased out by some other company and bought it for what was roughly equivalent to about 30 US-§.

It was a complete PC with display (CRT), keyboard (that's the part...) and a slim desktop case. The PC did it's job just fine for a couple of years and at some point we got a new IT infrastructure - iow another PC, with a little more oomph. But I grew very accustomed to the keyboard of the old PC, so I kept it with the new one. After another couple of years and a lot of typing on that keyboard, I quit the job and was finished with university and took up another job as an editor and hardware reviewer (which I am still doing today, more than ten years after I first hit a key on that board). And guess what I brought with me and on what I type all my articles to this day? 😉

And this keyboard was really not a very special thing, technically. Rubberdome, concave keylines etc. But it works to this days flawlessly, while my colleagues have worn through more than one very expensive keyboards. Privately, though, I am using an IBM Model M, which is in my service for even longer.

I can totally relate to keeping your old keyboard. I had an average mechanical keyboard from the early 90s and I've never been able to adjust to anything else. It was an obscure model, and I got so desperate to replace it that I had a saved search on ebay for at least 2 years. Recently it finally gave a result and I bought it - then a week later another one popped up which appears to be in better condition. ..frustrating, but I've told myself not to buy another one that I don't need.

Whenever I replace peoples PC's at work I give them the option to keep the old keyboard, these are just cheap HP ones that come with the PC Often people who can actually type will go for the nice new one for a day or so then ask for the old dirty one back as it feels right.

I've never thought about using a case motherboard tray as a mounting bracket RacoonRider, this has given me ideas, the Mrs no doubt will curse you for!

I had totally forgotten about the iPaQ's! Were actually nice little PC's for boring office work and had the hot swap bay for FDD, CD, Extra HDD. Totally not upgradeable though.

some kids down the street were "destroying" (smacking it with sticks) a pentium 4 HT HP. they said it was "old" despite having Win 7 Home on it. after they were done, I took it and made it work. it's my torrent slave now.
also, my best friend gave me his old PIII instead of trashing it
my grandfather tried recycling my PS/2 70 and I stopped him

armankordi wrote:

some kids down the street were "destroying" (smacking it with sticks) a pentium 4 HT HP. they said it was "old" despite having Win 7 Home on it. after they were done, I took it and made it work. it's my torrent slave now.

Even though I don't really care for P4 hardware, all I can say is idiots

smeezekitty wrote:

armankordi wrote:

some kids down the street were "destroying" (smacking it with sticks) a pentium 4 HT HP. they said it was "old" despite having Win 7 Home on it. after they were done, I took it and made it work. it's my torrent slave now.

Even though I don't really care for P4 hardware, all I can say is idiots

You obviously haven't seen any of the "watch me blow stuff up" videos on Youtube.

sliderider wrote:

smeezekitty wrote:

armankordi wrote:

some kids down the street were "destroying" (smacking it with sticks) a pentium 4 HT HP. they said it was "old" despite having Win 7 Home on it. after they were done, I took it and made it work. it's my torrent slave now.

Even though I don't really care for P4 hardware, all I can say is idiots

You obviously haven't seen any of the "watch me blow stuff up" videos on Youtube.

Oh yes. I have seem them.
They tend to tick me off so I avoid them unless what they are blowing up is useless

I know I'm reviving a year old thread, but I think this should be kept up.

Yesterday I found a wet, scratched up and yellowed DELL desktop near a dumpster with a bunch of rubble on top of it, probably the person who discarded it did some renovations on their house. It's a Dell Optiplex GXA. I've opened it up, and it has a 266MHz PII CPU, 32MB of ram (2x16MB), a 3,2GB Quantum HDD + a 20GB seagate, FDD + Asus 48x CD-ROM drive. Sound and video are on board (ATI Rage + Crystal codec). Two PCI slots and two ISA slots. Heven't cleaned or tested it yet.

Now I have quite a few slot 1 motherboards (5 to be precise) as well as a few working slot 1 machines (600MHz P3 + Soyo intel board, several Vectra SF 500MHz PIII machines, and a 350MHz P2 Compaq Deskpro 1000), so not much use for this dell - but I will clean it up and restore it if it runs. Might be an interesting fast DOS machine. I'll keep you posted and upload some pics tomorow.

kanecvr wrote:

Yesterday I found a wet, scratched up and yellowed DELL desktop near a dumpster with a bunch of rubble on top of it, probably the person who discarded it did some renovations on their house. It's a Dell Optiplex GXA. I've opened it up, and it has a 266MHz PII CPU, 32MB of ram (2x16MB), a 3,2GB Quantum HDD + a 20GB seagate, FDD + Asus 48x CD-ROM drive. Sound and video are on board (ATI Rage + Crystal codec). Two PCI slots and two ISA slots. Heven't cleaned or tested it yet.

I have one of those systems myself, that, ironically enough, was also a dump rescue! This happened about five years ago, and, when I got it, it was running Windows XP... XP + a 266MHZ P-II + 32MB of RAM = slooooooooooooooow. I put 98SE on that thing almost immediately. I believe it originally came out of my middle school. Believe it or not, that system's not the only system I've rescued that might've come from my middle school - in addition to a P-III Dell Dimension L733R and an IBM ThinkPad 365X Pentium-100 laptop.

Best story I have is saving a computer that was about to head to the dump. Saw one of my neighbors packing up a Packard Bell Legend system with original monitor and speakers, getting it ready to be dumped. I asked if I could have it, and they gave it to me. That Packard Bell turned out to be a Socket 4 P-60. 😀 This was also several years ago. Much more recently, I rescued an Acer Aspire 5336 laptop from the dump. Thing was basically torn to pieces when I got it - damage in many places, screen was beyond smashed, keyboard had become dislodged from the rest of the system, etc. To my complete astonishment, the laptop still worked. 😮 Here's a picture of it after replacing the screen and fixing what I could:

Yes, that piece of tape is holding a chunk of the bottom half of the laptop that broke off in place. It's just a Celeron-based system, but at least it works!

Windows XP... XP + a 266MHZ P-II + 32MB of RAM = slooooooooooooooow.

How? WIndows XP won't even install with less than 64 MB of RAM (and it's completely unusable with that)

smeezekitty wrote:

Windows XP... XP + a 266MHZ P-II + 32MB of RAM = slooooooooooooooow.

How? WIndows XP won't even install with less than 64 MB of RAM (and it's completely unusable with that)

That's how I remember it when I first got it from the dump. Maybe it was upgraded to 64MB (read: memory borrowed from another system) just to install XP before returning the borrowed RAM to its original system. Or the installation files were modified so that the XP installer can run on <64MB.