Major Haul!!!

[Quadraman]

So my city is having their annual cleanup where everyone puts all the junk they've managed to accumulate out for free pickup, so I decide to go cruising for about 4 hours and see what I can find. The usual assortment of rag, bottle and bone men/women were out. Furniture restorers, antiques dealers, scrap metal merchants, TV and radio repair guys, mower motor fixer uppers, you name it, they were out in force. Anyway, while cruising around looking for Macs, I figured I'll pick up any PC crap boxes I find to strip for parts to sell on ebay so at least I get my gas money back. It was pretty uneventful most of the night. A lot of P2,P3, and a couple of P4 boxes. Some 286-486 machines, but I left those for the landfill. Not enough sellable parts in most of those to bother throwing them in the trunk. It's a shame, too, because there was a really nice Tandy 486SX33 system with monitor and printer BOXED out at one place, but I didn't have enough room and didn't think I'd be able to get anything for it, even a complete system packed in the original boxes. Shipping costs would be a deal breaker.

So after collecting about 20 PC's, I almost drive past one pile hidden in the shadows. I stop and check it out and see a monitor. Lots of those out, most I left because they are just generic VGA crap and I have enough of those. This monitor looks beige, though. A Mac? Getting closer I notice a flat box with computer ports next to the monitor stuffed between it and a piece of wood. I pull it out. 8-o A IIc!!!! No BS an honest to goodness IIc with monitor and Imagewriter printer!! Into the back seat it goes. It's too good to sit in the trunk with the PCs. I had promised that if I found a Mac, I would quit looking, but I have a loophole. A IIc isn't a Mac, so the search continues.

A little while later, a Sun SparcClassic(!), and after that a C64 and 1541 disk drive. A few PC's later and I hit the motherlode. THREE (3) Macs in one pile. I couldn't believe it. A 6100/66 that looked to be an AV but the video card had been removed. Not a problem as I have a loose 7100 HPV card that I can use with it. Also, a 7600/132 and a 9500/200. There were also three Apple 14" monitors there, but I have plenty of those already. There was also a box there with documentation for the 6100 and a couple floppys and (trumpets sound) that funky monitor cable that the 6100's use looking like it had never been removed from the box. So, keeping my promise, I packed up the Macs and headed home. Tomorrow I'll be spending the day picking over PC carcasses and testing the Apples to make sure they have all their relevant bits and are in working order. Maybe I'll even find some upgrades inside. That would be nice. [] ]'>

 

[heebiejeebies]

You promised you'd go home if you found a Mac. Did you promise you wouldn't go out again?

Well that's not too shabby. Mine's coming up in a month or so's time so maybe some of your luck will rub off on me.

 

[Bunsen]

Hey Quadraman, you're in Australia, right? Where's all this funky Mac action happening at? I've had a few good hauls in Melbourne, but yours wins by a long shot for a single night out. Well done.

A freakin' complete Apple IIc rig. mngrflmgrrrrrr

 

[Quadraman]

No, sorry not Australia. I was going to mention about that Nubus card you had that I wanted, I didn't realize where you were located at the time I said I wanted it, so it will have to go to someone local if you decide to let it go one day.

 

[ChristTrekker]

I wish my town had "annual cleanup" days like that! I'd be out with the scavengers, you betcha...

 

[Quadraman]

Well, been sorting for a couple of hours. The Macs and the IIc all look to be intact, but I haven't powered them up yet. No good upgrades in any of them. The 9500 looks like it had at least 2 PCI cards installed at one time because two of the metal slot covers are missing. The 7600 has a 1.2gig HD and the 6100 and 9500 both have 4gig drives. I'd been looking for larger SCSI drives for a while because all my current beige Powermacs have 500meg drives. The 6100 has 64megs RAM if the stickers on the DIMMS are to be believed and the 7600 and 9500 both have all their memory slots filled, but I don't know what capacity the memory is in those.

I also managed to strip two of the PC's. One was a Gateway 850mhz P3 and the other was a 2.5ghz P4 eMachines. The Gateway had lots of upgrades inside. A sound Blaster Live card, an nVidia 7100, and an ultra 66 hard drive card. I got a 1.5ghz P4 from this load fixed up with most of the upgrade boards from the Gateway for my mom. She is using a 500mhz machine my brother gave her but he put XP on it and it runs really slowly and the CPU gets swamped a lot and freezes. XP is too much for that machine. It needs to go. I have an HP 2.4ghz Celeron here with a blown motherboard that I planned to try to combine with the parts from the 2.5ghz eMachines to make a running machine to install Linux on. Well, back to the slog. I have to do this outside and it is hot out today. Like most of you, I am sure, my work area is overflowing with computer projects and I have no room for a single thing more in there.

 

[heebiejeebies]

People are throwing out 2.5ghz P4s?! That's insane!! I got given this machine at work only fairly recently and it's the same speed!

 

[LCGuy]

It wouldnt' surprise me...i've gotten 2 free P4s in the past year. Both were having...well..."complications" however.

Its funny...i can get all the PC stuff i want handed to me on a plate, but Mac stuff seems to be like hens teeth!!!

 

[The Macster]

Strangely enough, Mac stuff seems easier for me to find, if anything - I seem to have accumulated a lot more Macs, and also the Mac stuff that I've found has been generally better quality than the PC stuff - I've got a few reasonable Macs for free, but only about one decent PC.

 

[Quadraman]

People are throwing out 2.5ghz P4s?! That's insane!! I got given this machine at work only fairly recently and it's the same speed!

Yeah. There's a problem with models that use a particular motherboard marketed by several manufacturers, eMachines and HP/Compaq among them where a crappy PSU that was matched to the motherboard goes haywire and surges blowing out the motherboard. I found an HP previously with a bad motherboard so I was going to replace with the eMachines one. Unfortunately, you can't replace the power supply to eliminate the surge problem as it uses unique voltages and the models in question were out of production and out of warranty before the problem became obvious, so no alternate PSU was ever sourced. I got that sorted, but now the hard drive won't boot. Now I have to find a suitable drive that I can format for Linux. I really wanted to use the one that was in there as it was a 7200 RPM drive and all the rest of the ones I have are 5400.

Oh and a little correction to my previous post. I booted up the 9500 and on the Mac OS 8.6 splash screen, the name Radius appeared. That got me happy. I shut down and opened up the 9500 and pulled the video card, and it turns out is a Radius Thunderpower, I'm just not sure which model. I could test it if I had a monitor capable of displaying up to 1920X1600 because the biggest difference between the models is the resolutions they support, but I don't and there is no model number or anything on it that Googles to tell me what it is. Also, the 6100/66 turns out to be a DOS compatible, not an AV. The card that is missing is the DOS card. Those can be hell to find on ebay for a reasonable price, too.

 

[LCGuy]

Strangely enough, Mac stuff seems easier for me to find, if anything - I seem to have accumulated a lot more Macs, and also the Mac stuff that I've found has been generally better quality than the PC stuff - I've got a few reasonable Macs for free, but only about one decent PC.

I think its interesting the way that works. For me, if i need anything PC, whether its a monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, scanner, case, power supply, mobo, graphics card, sound card, software, etc, all i have to do is ask around and its usually a hand's grab away.

If i need anything Mac, however, i usually have to ask around and then wait a long, long, long, long time, until i can next afford to jump on a plane to Sydney, and then keep praying i can find it. *laughs*

 

[The Macster]

If i need anything Mac, however, i usually have to ask around and then wait a long, long, long, long time, until i can next afford to jump on a plane to Sydney, and then keep praying i can find it. *laughs*

Yes, I suppose parts for PCs are easy to find anywhere - actual complete Macs seem pretty common here though, maybe more so than for you. Though laptops, PC or Mac, seem near-impossible to find, unless broken or extremely old. Mac parts are harder to find though, eg I couldn't find a Mac graphics card anywhere an ended up having to stump up £20 ( ) for a 32 meg Radeon Mac Edition on eBay, whereas I'm sure I would have been able to get a PC card from Freecycle had I needed one. And I've asked several times on Freecycle for a USB Apple mouse in the hope of scoring that gorgeous Pro Mouse for my G3 to replace the rather-crummy ADB II with a nice optical mouse, but have been offered nothing, not even a hockey puck one.

 

[LCGuy]

Yeah...PC laptops are sometimes available, but usually they're either missing the power supply and/or have been thrashed like a stolen car. Complete Macs are sometimes available but usually they're too expensive for my tastes.

Btw, the ADB II Mouse isn't crummy! IMHO they're one of the most comfortable mice ever made.

 

[The Macster]

Compared to the Pro Mouse it is though I much prefer optical mice, and the Pro is just so gorgeous! Anyway, I have a plan up my sleeve to get one...I will tell more as it develops The ADB II isn't bad I suppose, but the G3 is my "modern" Mac and so I want it tricked out with some of the super-awesome post-beige Apple stuff - the screen it came with is so cool, as is OS X, that the old beige mouse (same as the one on my old 6100!) looks so old-fashioned next to it, the dark-coloured Pro would match it much better

Any Mac that's more than free is really too expensive for my taste ( ), though luckily there seems to be a reasonable selection of desktop Macs up to G3 around for free. I've built-up what I feel to be quite a good cross-section of the range of OldWorld/beige Macs this way: the only major thing I'm missing is a colour or PPC laptop (and maybe a 68k tower, though that's more of a space issue than difficulty finding). Compact, 68k desktop, 68k laptop, PPC desktop, PPC tower, OS X-capable Mac - all the major categories filled otherwise

 

[Bunsen]

Hey Quadraman, if the Commodore 64 turns out to be dead, or not wanted, let's talk

 

[Quadraman]

I have yet to find a laptop of any description out on trash day. I think, though, it has nothing to do with them not being thrown out as much as it has to do with them being small enough to fit into a black plastic garbage bag with the rest of the trash. Thousands of laptops probably get thrown out every day, you just don't see any of them because they are bagged.

 

[Bunsen]

I've found a couple, both around p-166 to 266 standard

 

[The Macster]

I have yet to find a laptop of any description out on trash day. I think, though, it has nothing to do with them not being thrown out as much as it has to do with them being small enough to fit into a black plastic garbage bag with the rest of the trash. Thousands of laptops probably get thrown out every day, you just don't see any of them because they are bagged.

I meant more that you rarely see them on Freecycle or anywhere, whereas desktop machines are much more common - we don't seem to have these special days for leaving out computers and stuff anyway, you have to take

to the local tip or arrange a collection instead for anything like that which shouldn't be put out with the ordinary rubbish.

 

[Bunsen]

A complete IIc setup on trash day ... I'm still reeling from that one.