Freecycle Comes Through

I got my first load of Freecycle loot today! Freecycle friend Michelle generously donated 2 computer towers, 2 monitors, a hard drive, a set of amplified speakers, a power supply, and a keyboard to my cause.

I have examined a few of the items. The keyboard, power supply, and one of the monitors were bad, and are going straight to E-Waste. Signs for the second monitor are not hopeful - the VGA connector has a couple of missing pins! We'll see if it's usable. The speakers are fine, and may become an iPod-based home stereo system.

The mid-tower turns out to be something of a diamond in the rough. It's complete except for a hard drive. Everything else appears to be okay. It POSTS, except for having a hard drive. By which, I mean that at least the memory is good, and it can detect the CD-ROM and floppy drive. No telling yet if the 'extra' hard drive in the pile o' stuff was the hard drive for this machine. Or what shape it's in. I promised Michelle I'd load up the drive in my system and look for personal data before I reformatted it, so there's some work to be done yet.

For those of you keeping score at home, the mid-tower is a Celeron 333MHz with 256MB RAM. It's generations old now, but it's perfect for my headless-linux-in-the-closet scheme. Come to think of it, I have memory that should work with it stashed away in my parts box. I'll have to find it.

The only clue about the heart of the mini-tower system is that it comes with a 5 1/4" disk drive. So it may be seriously ancient.