Question. Since Windows 10 end of life made a lot of computers become “e-waste” technically, they should be easy to find and cheap, right? But when I look online I’m finding fewer of these computers that can’t run Widows 11 on the second hand market. There are easily reasons for that, but what I’m really interested in is if anyone knows the best places both online and in person where one can pick up all these perfectly good, yet Win11 incompatible, computers from?
Don’t assume that they throw away the computer, many users switched to Linux , others keep Windows 10 and the rest store the machine somewhere. Moreover even the most naïve users learnt how to circumvent the checks and install Windows 11, YouTube is full of such videos.
Individual users…no they won’t. Businesses who form the bulk of Microsoft’s revenue these days….they will get rid of their old hardware and switch to new Win11 machines because “Big Brother” Microsoft tells them to. I was hoping someone in the community knew something I didn’t about how to get my paws on freshly wiped corporate hardware.
You must be joking. Either that or you just don’t want to deal with Ebay. I wouldn’t blame you, selling on Ebay can be a hassle, especially when you start selling enough for them to start charging for your listings. But if you can deal with the hassle you can make some side money with all those laptops. Just install Mint on all of them and sell them as “Linux Laptops”. Include the hardware specs and the Linux distro in the item description and you have a little bit of side revenue with your pallet of 2008 IBMs.
Yea I did install linux on some of them, Debian and Mint are way too slow and max out the ram, cant even use a browser. Only a few like Puppy linux worked. Linux really has become bloated over the years… Was thinking of seeing if I can do that mod to disable the IntelME backdoors.
Interesting. Which version of Mint did you try? Cinnamon or XFCE? I ask because XFCE is supposedly lightweight and optimized for computers that are more than 10 years old. Still it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a limit on that.
You might be able to harvest the RAM chips and make some money with those. If all else fails, reclaiming scrap gold from electronics is always an option, and with 100 latops you might actually have enough metal to take to a coin shop and get appraised with an XRF scanner.
Those machines can work comfortably with GUIs only with Puppy Linux or other configurations with light kernels and special lightweight window managers like i3, OpenBox etc similar to the ones DistroTube experiments with regularly. MINIX , Free-BSD etc come into play too.
The webpages have become very heavy and maybe it would be difficult even to reproduce videos above 720.
There best use would be as routers or driving various technological equipment like radio stations and scientific or medical equipment.
Maybe they would be useful and valuable for exchange in the case of shortages and the technological regression that seems to be approaching in the neo-futulistic world they are preparing.
Of course in the latter case being prepared and holding stock of things like precious metals, food, arms etc makes you a direct target.
Yea I got a friend with a solar panel and I setup one of my machines to deticate to running the old software for it (panel moves). Good for base station type uses (but power consumption might b concern).
These old thinkpads have great build quality, but their screens are oddly square for todays standards. You could buy a device 10x faster for $100 on Ebay so I dont think they will sell, I think they consume a lot more electricity than modern machines too. They got the IBM logo on them which has great nostalgia value so I dont wanna scrap em.
Yes, much lower integration chips and back then there weren’t many mobile versions, this is why Intel never made it into the phone industry, only CISC circuits with high consumption.
Kind of a corner you’re painted into there. I don’t suppose you need to keep all of them for nostalgia value. Only one or two. For the historical value you might donate one or two to a computer museum. If you can’t make money selling them because 2008 really is too obsolete, then the best monetary value really is going to be to look at the parts and take them apart.
There are three things in those laptops that are potentially valuable. 1) The RAM chips, which are selling at a premium right now, even if they’re old. 2) The GPU; even if it’s outdated and weak people who mine cryptocurrency will still snatch them up for the added processing power. (THANKS Crypto and AI for making electronics more expensive for the rest of us!) 3) The scrap gold in the circuit boards. The rest can be handed over to Staples for electronics recycling.
Of course if you don’t want to dismantle them, and you don’t want to throw them away, and you can’t sell them with a light Linux distro, then….yeah, you’re pretty much in a corner and have a pallet of nostalgic paperweights.
Unless a lot of somebodies have an alternate use for them that I’m not thinking about? Maybe sell them as nostalgia pieces for $50 each?
My local Best Buys has several refurbed Surface Pro 2 in 1 tablet/laptop by the Good Guys techs for under $200. They include a warranty. GitHub has a free script designed to easily modify the UEFI, Secure boot, TPM and run many Linux distros ( Arch and Debian). I may pick up a few just for Nostalgia reasons. Last week my last gas fill up cost me $150. So whats $200 for an unusable on WIN 11 pc?
Haha! That’s putting it into context,alright! If people are into building computers, there are motherboards around WITHOUT the TPM chip. I built up an Asus X58 without one