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Unofficial app reminds not to give up on your non-Windows 11-ready PC, also suggests Linux - Neowin (www.neowin.net)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] sugar_in_your_tea 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

Look for surplus sales, many large orgs (esp. universities) have them periodically throughout the year. I got a PC for $50 years ago, and it worked, it just wasn't modern.

I recommend at least upgrading the PSU though, since the ones that have tend to suck, and consider getting a new case as well since a standard PSU may not fit and they're certainly not big enough to hold a GPU.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I recently got a $100 PC that's now an Ubuntu server running your typical qBittorrent/Xarr/Plex/VPN stack, a local web server (for accessing said services), and nginxproxymanager all across docker containers. It's not powerful by modern standards (i5-7600), but for what I use it for it's way overkill. It's currently sitting at 5% memory utilization of the 8GB of RAM it has despite running all that with many active torrents.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 1 points 11 months ago

Nice! I still have my PC from 2009-ish (Phenom II X4) running my NAS and serving DLNA (for my smart TV), and I'm planning to downsize a bit to save on power (looking at ARM boards like RockPro64).

Older machines make for great servers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Some friend in college in the 00s got a 4 foot high stack of 3com hubs for like 10 bucks each from the university surplus.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Did they resell them? I can't think of any other reason to buy that many...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Yeah, listed them on eBay if I recall. The also got a switch and a few other things.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I am kind of jealous of universities that are well-funded enough to upgrade their hardware. Most computers in my uni are as old as the building, running XP or 7)

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 2 points 11 months ago

I'm guessing you live in a relatively poor area?

I worked for a university's IT dept and we had a support contract with the manufacturer (HP in our case) and we'd upgrade at the end of that contract. We'd also have a common image that gets loaded on every morning, so every computer got reset every day. I assume that's how most campuses work. We'd usually run the oldest supported version of windows, because upgrading meant we'd have to rebuild the image and reverify all of our software, and we were lazy.

So every year, there would be a bunch of surplus computers, all 3-5 years old, and they'd usually go for $50, keyboard were usually $10, mice ~$5, and monitors varied (IIRC, we didn't replace them as often). They were usually pretty crappy computers though.