SCSI to IDE

[Liam Proven]

On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 7:54 PM, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> You keep on telling us that things are different between Brazil and the
> States, and what is common in one place is not common in the other. Whcih
> I happily accept. All I can say is that the UK is different again. Or at
> least I've enver found any form of Pentium PC for free.

Oh, come *on*, Tony. You live about a 45min cycle ride from me. You
are not in some parallel universe!

Just last year I gave 14 Pentium-class machines in a single
transaction to a chap on Freecycle, and I was /very/ glad to do so,
because otherwise they'd have been off to the recycling centre.

It is virtually impossible to *give* anything as old as a
Pentium-class machine away these days. The last few individual
machines I've given to Freecyclers were Cyrix 6x86-powered, in the
region of 200-300MHz. I gave them away on Freecycle because no charity
will accept machines that old. In the summer, I donated 4 PCs to the
collection scheme at the Zeitgeist pub in Vauxhall - a few
circa-1500MHz AMD AthlonXP boxes and a 2.6GHz Pentium-4-class Celeron.
These were too low-specification for ComputerAid to be interested in
them.

No, you don't often see free Pentium machines any more, because
they're "skipware" - too old to be of any interest to any ordinary
user these days.

The current class of free kit most commonly going is stuff like ~2GHz
Pentium 4 boxes and low-end Athlon64 machines. Occasionally you'll get
late-model Pentium III machines but most of them disappeared by 3-4y
ago.

I though the reason you limped along on your PC-AT with a 486 in it
was that it was the latest-model PC you could get for which you had
full schematics and so on. Machines 2 orders of magnitude show up in
skips beside the road all the time. Try your local recycling centre -
you'll probably find piles of them, you just need to get to 'em before
they're left out in the rain.

(10sec on Google) Try Townmead - they take electricals.
Townmead Road, Re-use and Recycling Centre, Townmead Road (off
Mortlake Road), Kew, TW9 4EL. Telephone 020 8876 3281 for more
details.

If you /want/ a newer PC that's not been scrapped, I have a dual
Athlon MP 1600+ machine in the garage. It worked, it just very
occasionally hard-reset for no apparent reason. It's been extensively
cannibalised - now it's just a motherboard in a case - but if you want
it it's yours. I can probably find you graphics, sound, hard disks,
optical drive, PSU and ancillary cabling.

I also have a dual Pentium-II 400 that I have been using for some
server testing, but I'd consider it to be too old for use as a desktop
machine any more. You /can/ access the Web on a Pentium II but it's
not terribly pleasant. It's in a ginormous full-tower Gateway case I
was planning to strip out and try to eBay off to some casemodder for
phase-change cooling or something

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
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