I gave away another free computer today … an ancient Optiplex GX150 that lost its case, but had a valid Win2K sticker. One of my coworkers took it home. It was terribly, terribly ugly, but worked fine. 667Mhz, 64Mb, 6.4Gb and onboard everything else. No self-respecting technophile would be interested, but it’s a decent machine for run-of-the-mill applications.

Two other people were interested, but didn’t move fast enough to claim it, so I kind of offered to build two more for free.

The timing is good, though. The recycle center had two giant cardboard boxes lined with Pentium 1-2-3 machines, some even with memory and hard drives. I grabbed enough spare parts to keep me flush for a while, and even found one 7200rpm Western Digital hard drive … only 9Gb, but it’s speed that matters to me.

That one went into the rehabbed GX150 I have in the house, along with a little more memory. That will keep me going until the stuff from Newegg arrives. And if I get off my rear and order more PC2100, I can put the new hard drive into the P4-2.53 that’s just sitting here.

I’m going to need a monitor. And a KVM switch. Geez.

And one last bit of good news: Found a Poweredge 1300 too. It’s a dual P3-500, so it’s not real practical (the GX150 is faster, technically), but it has three SCSI drives in it and four sticks of PC100 server memory. I can add it to the render farm.