Wednesday, December 17th, 2014

	Another free computer
	~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Few months ago I wrote a post about how I've got my current PC
laptop for free. I said, there was probably too much of CPU power
in the world, because what other explanation could there be for
the fact, that you can get this kind of computer for free. That 
statement was recently proven correct.

Two weeks ago I was going down the street and discovered an 
incomplete PC desktop standing next to trash cans. I'm not much into
PC compatibles, however I looked briefly inside and at first just
took the CR-2032 lithium cell, because you simply never have enough
of these, especially if you have a handheld and palmtop collection.
 
However I noticed the motherboard being about the same as I had in
my last PC in 2001, before I abandoned x86 in favor of PowerPC.
After a while of googling I found, that the board is in fact even
newer than that, it came to market in 2004. That makes it  roughly
the same age as my G5 and as I'm perfectly alright with my G5, 
I presumed that the computer will disappear overnight to the hands
of someone, who will use it.

Wrong. It's a strange weird world we live in, since computer was
still there even after 24 rainy hours. That was exactly when
I decided to take it. 

To my surprise both CPU and motherboard were OK, with the exception
of one SATA port, which simply was not there. After providing RAM
and power supply I have a working machine, which can still do a lot
of work. 

The chassis has a mid-tower form factor and thus can be populated 
with four 5.25" and two 3.5" drives, which should be enough for 
couple of floppy drives, CD-ROM, JAZ and ZIP drive. Since I have 
hundreds of floppies and other media for computers in my collection,
a machine that can copy them and create backup images will be quite
handy. Of course, I wouldn't buy a computer just for a single task,
but now I have it for free. Crazy, crazy world.

.