Ask HN: Does anyone have an old computer laying around unused in Brisbane, AU? I'm currently unemployed, broke and using a 5-year-old laptop to work on my startup. The laptop has undergone multiple emergency surgeries and is basically on life support at this stage, going into cardiac arrest every hour or so. Does anyone happen to have an old laptop or desktop laying around unused? I'm really, really not fussy about what type of machine it is, or how many times it has traveled around the sun. |
Here is the URL for the Brisbane group: https://groups.freecycle.org/group/freecycle_brisbane/posts/...
Yes, I'm fully aware there are better machines I could have used for a fairly nominal amount, but all I needed was bash, mutt and vim, and money was better spent on food and water.
Graduated to using a "broken (needed a new HDD)" ibook when the roof decided it didn't feel like keeping rain out one night.
That doesn't help one jot with your immediate problem, but I empathise, and have been in your shoes.
I mean, if a Pi can run perfectly well for $35, where's the place where you can just go and get a ready-to-go PC for under $50, BYO salvaged peripherals? It doesn't quite seem to make sense? PC/mobile manufacturing is so competitive.
Isn't this a market anyone wants?
Isn't this a market anyone wants?
A raspberry pi might only cost $35, but don't forget you'll need an SD card, and a power supply, and a case, and a wifi dongle, and a keyboard, and a mouse, and a monitor, and HDMI and power cables, and maybe a powered USB hub.
Email me hnpc at eggsampler dort com
PS - I am from India.
BTW, you can salvage the hard drive, possibly the memory, and other parts from the laptop easily. Hard drives can pretty much be substituted on any other laptop but memory will need to be of the same type and compatible.
One other way is to check out the surrounding local council's hard rubbish collection days. Scour the nature strip for exactly this and you will be quite lucky. Your chances improve with the poshness of the council.
I recycled a Multi-function printer 8 years back in Melbourne, Australia and it works fine except its hard to get the print cartridges, so gets used mostly as a scanner.
For $50 you can take some risk. It can't be a huge learning curve but it doesn't need to do everything you need a computer to do for the next 4 years, which was the paradigm that lead to Windows dominance. IE, if I'm buying a PC in 2002, the cost is serious and I need to get years out of it. I can't risk it sucking. For $50 the risk is on par with a pair of jeans. Sometimes you wear them all the time. Sometimes you don't like the,
The most obvious paths seems to me to give Google some competition in their Chrome OS market. Pi, Ubuntu, Mozilla. Tablets are great, but I think a significant part of the froth is just a side effect of (A) A fresh start on UI paradigms and backwards compatibility debt and (B) Price.
It's just a different kind of decision when the price is as low as it can be today.
Apple and Microsoft ingrained a lot of intellectual shortcuts in regard to the way people in the mainstream think about computing in their quests for market share. So of course has Google. In fairness, these abstractions simplify the daunting complexity of deciding among a vast domain of computing options.