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Did I make a good find???

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Dusnoetos

Member
Joined
Nov 16, 2007
Location
Twin Cities MN
To day while on campus getting ready for the next term to start on Thursday; I was Snooping around the campus technology area. I have often dug through their computer scrap bin. Until to day the most useful (working) things I have found have been case parts and fans and a few pathetic speakers.
Well today they had a complete computer case (still with the security padlock on it). Well knowing that the tech department sells all working computers I figured that this one had to be dead - but figured I could scavenge the heat sinks and fans at worst.
Once I started to remove the very LCD monitors that was on it I realized why this computer was abandoned. the entire case was covered in spilled ink...:D
I cleaned the ink off the best i could there at school and brought the computer home - where I proceeded to clean the case with copious amounts of Isopropyl Alcohol. Thankfully the insides were untouched by the ink

Well long story short.:rolleyes:
The computer works.
What I got was this:
decent Micro ATX case,
CD/RW drive
Sparkle PSU (will replace at first chance)
Seagate 40gb HDD
512MB (2x 256) DDR333 ram
A Shuttle MN31N Micro ATX motherboard. http://eu.shuttle.com/archive/en/mn31n.htm
With an AMD Athlon XP 2500+ CPU

I am decently surprised by what I found. Did I make a good find?

As I am typing this I am installing XP on it .....
 
Interesting find there. Usually when I find something like that, the mobo or something critical is dead, so I scavenge what I can out of it, and have had quite a few CPU keychains. That should run XP somewhat decently, but it could probably use a little bump in the RAM area if you have any laying around. I think there might still be some floating around in the classies somewhere as well.
 
Ya more ram would help.... but all I have in extra DDR flavor is ECC....

at the moment I am installing all the boring windows updates... But in the end I think I will put Ubuntu on this rig.

Once the updates are done I think I will run Orthos prime or something to test synthetic stability.
 
I think you would be much happier with the performance of Ubuntu than XP. As the newer versions come out, they seem to work faster and faster on older hardware. Of course it could just be me, as I feel that Win7 runs faster on my Q6600 rig than XP ever did. Actually in terms of performance on my rig, it seems to be Win7>Vista>XP.
 
What exactly are you going to use it for? lol..
To single handedly compute the meaning of life....:rolleyes:

for now it will replace the computer I just recently sold (to help out a friend in need - plus the money was nice). I have simply found that having two indipendent computers at my desk has advantages... particulary while working on large reserch projects.

But I might turn this machine into a HTPC. The Nforce2 chipset seems to have some unique sound and video options.
 
Nforce2s are great. They are the only motherboards to have anywhere decent onboard sound, and for that alone they ought to be recognized as a piece of computing history.

BTW, why are you replacing the Sparkle? Those power supplies are generally good quality.

Sparkles are rebadged FSPs.
 
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