Poll: What kind of Computer Related Stuff Have you Found at Goodwill for an Insane Price.

Just picked up two Toshiba Libretto's (mini laptops). 30T and a 20T. The 20T was missing the keyboard. The 30T had its keyboard and it has Japanese AND english characters on it. And a dock as well.

They both work fine and boot Windows 95. Neat little toys.

in the last 3 weeks;

an awesome little dulcimer with a cardboard body (Simplicity Dulcimer - Retail $65.00) for $5.00

an Onkyo Cassette deck for $4.99
and a Pioneer Elite DV-C36 5 disc DVD player (I use it in CD Mode) for $20.00!!

My local goodwill ROCKS!!!

All of these were free...

An IBM NetVista with Celeron 667mhz, 256MB RAM, DVD+/-RW and 80GB hard disk.

Dell Dimension with Celeron 566mhz, 512MB RAM, CD-ROM and 10GB hard disk. Came with a 17" CRT, keyboard, mouse and monitor.

iMac Rev. B with 288MB RAM, 20GB hard disk. Came with a white Apple USB keyboard and white USB optical mouse and a computer desk.

256MB SO-DIMM for my Lombard. It's finally up to 512MB! Woohoo!

This is the thread that never dies. I'll bet ten years from now there'll still be people posting on it. Obviously, it serves a need.

I picked up another iMac DV off the side of the road during the bulky item trash collection week this month. This one worked fine--just a bad hard drive. I think that makes about 15 iMac DV's that I've scooped up off the side of the road over the past few years. Made some money off of some of them. I usually scoop up at least one working P4 PC every month. Found a nice little Asus 2.8Ghz this month which I kept, and a Dell Dimension which I stripped and tossed back out. No core duos yet. I keep my eyes peeled for the day a G5 tower shows up. I pick up most of the computers I see discarded because I pull the motherboards and other circuit boards from the ones that don't have value and give them to my friend who's making Tiki sculptures out of circuit boards. I'll have to post some pictures of them when he gets a show up. They're very cool.

A standard ATX/MATX case with a working P4 motherboard. My current P4 system is a not-quite-whole Shuttle box with a few parts missing. It works but it isn't pretty....

An Apple IIe (or II+, it's in a box in the attic) with a dual floppy disk drive, an Apple IIc, An Apple IIgs, monitors for each....

A Mac 128, a 512, a Plus, an SE, an SE FDHD, another SE FDHD, an SE/30, a Performa 575, a Color Classic, a 6500/225, a 5500/225 (with TV card), a IIci, an LC III, a 660AV, a 6100/66, an ImageWriter II, a LaserWriter 360, a LaserWriter SC, a LaserWriter 300, and a Color OneScanner 600/27. And about 7 Apple displays, and a bunch of keyboards and mice. And AppleTalk connectors.

I wish I hadn't passed on the touchscreen Tangerine iMac, though....

I could run a small business from my attic.

Just recently, I got an Apple Wireless keyboard (not the very newest, slim aluminum one, but the white one) still in the box, for $10.

Very good!

Also have gotten a Mac Classic, Personal Laserwriter NTR, StyleWriter II, SCSI Zip drive, and a few other oddments.

IBM AT 5170 with original monitor and keyboard for $20

i have had the best luck at garage sales... a 1.25ghz emac for $10, i also got a b&w g4 (yes, it had an upgrade) for free of the back of someones truck (flaged tham down and they gave it to me) also some old powermacs (ppc 604e) and some Imacs for next to nothing. it stinks that goodwill stoped taking computers... i have gotten apple keyboards from them though.

A fairly nice PC from the office due to power issues:

Athlon 64 3400+
2GB RAM
80GB hard disk
CD-RW drive
GeForce 5200 AGP video card with 128MB RAM

Strangely enough it did not shut down randomly with Ubuntu, only Windows. So far it appears to be due to the power supply. I moved the one from my main PC into it and it works fine now.

Also my wife and I bought a ThinkPad A22m for $60 with the dock.
P3 1ghz
512 MB RAM
CD-RW
No hard disk, but I was given a 60GB to use with it.
Pretty nice system!

In Los Angeles, Goodwill generally ships most of its computers and computers components to its downtown location on San Fernando Road. There's a "cage" there -- that is, a small (compared to the rest of the giant warehouse) fenced-in area where they bring the goods in to sell. They always have something that interests me. Unfortunately, there are also quite a few vultures there -- scrappers who hang around all day waiting for new items to come in. They seem to have some communication going with the Goodwill employees that work the cage, and they'll bully anyone who tries wants to buy something they've always arranged with the employee to purchase. (Though most Goodwill employees throughout Los Angeles are generally good, the ones who run the cage are questionably corrupt. Buyer beware.)

My best deals are at garage sales.
I have gotten an Apple IIe with monitor, disk drives and floppys for 15$ and a performa 5215 with carmen san-diego for free.

hello together....
reading this really hurts me.....
it seems that such stories are only to happen "over the pond"...
here in Germany the restrictions are that hard, that you are not permitted to pickup anything from the recycling/dumpyard......
garage-sales occur same often as the passby of the haley-comet....
the only source we have is fleabay or occasionaly trading within the former apple user community....

if people get here by estatesale a garage full of stuff it´s immediatly passed over to the
commercial trashpickers and they hunt for hidden money and a coffeecan of jewels....
talking with those guys is really insane....
the stuff that ends up there is to be viewed at fleabay and here in the thread of "this is laughable"

Nevertheless... i wish you all together good luck and much success ... that stuff is to good to become dumped away!

sincerely
speedyG

My local Goodwill store never has anything. I saw a crummy old USRobotics Courier modem in there once, but that's useless. The local Sally Ann doesn't accept computer stuff anymore, so they send it all to some unknown dude that might contact you if you leave a name and phone number. Yeah, right!

We have a Value Village that sells used stuff, but, again, there's never anything of "value" in there. At least not for the value conscious computer geek.

Basically, I never get anything at really good prices. Although, I have had the misfortune of trying to deal with people that were seeking insanely high prices for their old junk.

Ah, well...

Haha....I know how you feel. The most tech goodies to be found in local thrift shops and goodwills where I live are repulsively grungy dell keyboards and the occasional non-functional magnavox TV...with bent coaxial inputs to top it all off.

Same problem here or at least in this part of Canada. Once it hits the recyclers, it's gone. Same with the major thrift stores, they're paid a recycling fee for electronics so none of it makes it to the floor.

Hello to all AF members,
finally analyzing the facts it turns out to be a political problem......
On the one side you have an industry that wants to sell products - and politicians that believe this to be good for the economics ( oh yeah.... thats the way those guys collect taxes (!)
first from the industry giving money for material,
second from workers on the loan,
third from the shops and distribution ( you also bear the trucks in mind for transport and gasoline (tax) ?? )
forth from customers that pay sales-taxes......
thats a lot of bucks !!!!
Imagine it the other way around....:
a computer used 30 years instead of only 3 to 5 years.....
no first money from industry - they don´t have to buy material
no second money from workers - they don´t need to build that many computers.....
no third money from the stores - not that many sales - no sales tax no tax for sales employees, no transportation
no forth money from customers - their computers are still "in charge"..... ;-(
our economics is dependent to wasting material insread of extended usage....
long lasting products don´t bring the money to the shareholders, the politicians.....
intead of long lasting product the magic word is called obsolecence....
and the word "recycling" is maltreated for in fact a politic and economic dependency to waste.....
of course it´s not bad to recycle material instead of wasting nature....
but the very best way to protect nature from robbing and waste are products with long lasting life.....

just think about how much CO2 and steel would have been saved if the cars we have bought in the 60´s would be equipped with gasoline saving motors and and long lasting life...
and then bring up the car to the company and just exchange the motor against one with hybrid technology...
Can anyone here just calculate how many million tons of steel - how many millions of Watt of electricity for producing the aluminium would have been saved ????

How crazy this path is can just be demonstrated on the craziness within the printer-market....
it´s nowadays ( if you don´t refill ink by yourself ) more expensive to by 3 new inkcartridges from the original brand than buying a very new inkprinter.... thats the "ultima ratio" of the obsolecence-perversion.....

ir´s a fascinating fact that although the light-bulb cartell was judged to pay millions of dollars of fine the lightbulbs produced in the beginning of the century lasted for 2500 hours per one bulb and then restricted by the cartel the use was restricted to 1000 hours per bulb by the way they were manufactured and just even after the court spelled a sentence against the cartel you still can´t get bulbs again with 2500 hours lifetime.....
In the former German democratic republic they had lightbulbs with lifetime of 7500 hours and more ! So the technology is known... but it was taken from the market.... similar to gasoline saving motors and motors running with alternate technologies....

my newest computer was bought in 2002 ( a pentium 4 with 2,8 GHz ) .... instead of buy again and again new computers i just expanded mine with a card to work with SATA and after 8 years in 2010 i was forced by dropout of the harddisks
( the ones built within the last 15 years are restricted to shorter lifetime ) to replace them with new ones....

my both bycicles are both older than 30 years and still running perfect.... ( of course you must take them each year once completely apart clean them up and put again new grease in the ballgears, replace the brakingpads, remove every single bit of rust and so on )....

but back to the topic.....
keeping old computers "at life" and running or resurecting them is not the political mainstream....
economic mainstream and politics do NOT WANT this to happen....
so every step to make us the task harder, like taking away access to old parts is wanted.... because we DON´T bring the money ( or taxes ...)
just my private opinion....
sincerely speedyG

You know, when I posted this 7 years ago, I could still get good deals. Nowadays, I havent gotten a decent deal on old stuff locally in a LONG time.

hello gobabushka,
i did not want to stop the thread by my posting - i just wanted to spot out, that times are changing by the way that local and legal limitations change legal frame within the areas and make things harder anyhow.....
at least in the U.S. garage sales are still quite commen, so there are repeatingly chances ..... in europe this chance isn´t given at all, to local issues because the habit of sales from the front of a garage is nearly unknown .......
it would have been a good chance to copy this habit.... but it seems that in europe most countries unfortunatly preferred only to copy bad habits...
sincerely
speedyG

Back in 2004, I bought my first big-box Mac II for $10. Also picked up an Apple ][ Plus that had some video issues for $20... Haven't done much thrifting lately. No desk space for more 'puters.

-J