[rescue] Looking to rescue a PC

[Scott Newell]

At 08:16 PM 2/18/2010, Lionel Peterson wrote:

>Do you have a university nearby? I got a Dell workstation w/ dual

Yep (university of arkansas), but they sell in pallet-sized 
lots.  Seems like they were on a 6 month interval (january and july).


>I'd avoid GX270s, they are all dying at $work - bad caps - Dell had
>warranty repairs for them a few years ago, but had to know if a given
>machine was repaired or not. The Dell GX620s are pretty nice, and can
>take a dual core Pentium (old dual core D Pentiuns).

Good to know on the GX270.


>If you can swing $300-400, I'd take a look at some newer boxes, they
>may take much more RAM, and the ram might be more plentiful/cheaper
>than old systems (DDR2 vs. DDR or PC133).

Sure, I can swing whatever.  But if I'm going to spend >$200 or so, 
I'll have to do a lot more research and my expectations will be 
higher.  If I can keep it in the $100-$200 range, it's not such a big 
deal if I don't like it and end up giving it away.

I've been watching ebay, but the recommended optiplex 745 core2 units 
seem to be going for $200 and up, not the $100-$200 range.


>An older Xeon server might be a good way to go - I got a dual-CPU
>PowerEdge SC1425 w/ 3.0 GHz CPUs, 8 gig of RAM, two 73 Gig SCSI HDs
>for under $300 on eBay shipped w/rails. It's going to be my domain
>server/print server, etc.

Servers worry me a bit; are the non-rackmount boxes noisy, and do 
they have parallel ports?


thanks!
newell  N5TNL