Last year, about mid summer, I got some great deals online at auction of county.city surplus electronics, as practically no one was bidding. I was able to pick pallets with a dozen or so old towers with windows xp, or 98, or vista for as little as one dollar per unit. Missing hard drives, still a profitable scrapping buy, as the twenty pound steel case more or less recovered my initial investment. Throughout the autumn, more bidders began to bid, and often I would stop bidding when the price reached about two or three dollars per unit...again, I was buying strictly for scrap. As of now, the competition has become too fierce for me. This month, the heavy duty field laptops went for around 30 to 50 dollars per unit, and even the Dell towers went in excess of twenty dollars each. Last month, there were several lots that went for 14 or 15 dollars per pallet, or about 3 or 4 dollars each unit, but I had neglected to enter a higher maximum prebid, as I was expecting to bid online live. Most of those lots went for a dollar more per pallet than my max bid, with only one other bidder than me. I did have a friendly conversation with a gentleman who had outbid me on one pallet from police surplus, where he mentioned he had installed a harddrive in a couple of the machines, costing him $50 bucks each for the hard drive, but then he sold two machines for $150-$200 each.
Now for the second part of this post: I still have a half dozen of the optiplex towers without hard drives, and a couple of smaller dell box type computers. One of these was fully working, except the main system was password protected, but it had another operation system, I forget the name, that one could use to access the internet, etc, just couldn't download or save anything. So, a couple weeks ago, I ordered the "Xtra PC" flash drive, which is a USB stick with the Linux operating system, which supposedly allows you to boot up and use a computer that is missing a hard drive, or else just make your existing unit faster and better. I haven't tried it yet, so have no info to report on its function.
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