[sclug] On ultra cheap machines

[Ian Park]

My experience with refurbished office machines from eBay (or other 
sources - Speedie Computers [1] has come up with some useful ones for 
me) has been positive; I have a couple of low profile HP/Compaq ones, 
one used for an IPFire firewall/router and another as a Win XP box for 
jobs like keeping my TomTom sat nav updated and backing up my Blackberry 
phone; I've also set up an HP/Compaq mini tower for a friend (due to be 
updated this weekend from Ubuntu 11.04 to Mint Debian Edition - I think 
Unity would frighten her!), and they've all "just worked".

[1] http://www.speedie.co.uk/

Ian
-- 
Ian Park
email: i.d.c.park at ntlworld.com
--
On 25/04/13 23:15, David Given wrote:
> [bulk reply to save my handwriting]
>
> On 25/04/13 18:53, Robin Smith wrote:
>> I have an decent dual core pentium that flies on Arch Linux. Yours if
>> you collect. Throw in a beer if you want.
>
> Thank-you, but as he lives... (checks browser)... just under 1000km
> away, as the Google flies, I'm not going to carry it up in my rucksack.
> (Why are computers, which are fundamentally chunks of silicon
> considerably smaller than my fingernail, so bloody *heavy*?)
>
> On 25/04/13 18:26, Neil Brown wrote:
>> On 25 Apr 2013, at 18:04, David Given <dg at cowlark.com> wrote:
>>
>>>> Any suggestions?
>> Acer Revo / Veriton?
>
> Those look really nice, actually. The form factor is great and the price
> is... well, overpriced, but not badly so.
>
> On 25/04/13 21:27, Alex Butcher wrote:
>> On Thu, 25 Apr 2013, David Given wrote:
> [...]
>> Sounds like something like an N2800 Atom desktop board (e.g. Intel
>> DN2800MT)
>> might do the job.
>
> I had totally failed to find those earlier as the box shifters file them
> under 'miniITX' rather than 'motherboards'. Sigh. But yes, that's the
> sort of thing I was thinking of.
>
> [...]
>> Only downside is that the binary graphics drivers need antique
>> versions of the kernel and xorg...
>
> He's mainly an Ubuntu user; and for all their (many) sins, Ubuntu do a
> decent job of supporting weird and proprietary graphics hardware out of
> the box; any ideas if they're supporting it yet?
>
> ...
>
> Someone also reminded me via email that looking for last year's
> refurbished office PC on eBay is worth considering; it's absolutely
> awash with them for silly money. That has the advantage of getting a
> complete computer, and it gets delivered. The disadvantage, of course,
> is that they might not *work*...
>
> Anyway, thanks for the responses; it's been very useful.
>