[rescue] Sun Ultra 20s on surpluscomputers.com

[Lionel Peterson]

My "group" has about 200+ GX270s in daily use around the public school district, as they die they are replaced with other GX270s in storage until they also die. We may run Win7 on them with 2 Gigs of RAM (they'll take up to 4 Gigs, and they have a (one) SATA port on the MB), and the onboard graphics will support Aero. The caps still blow-up, but until they do, these are solid workhorse computers.

I didn't say I would buy one at $129, I said they were selling (as in being offered and I assume selling) - the value is in the eye of the buyer.

The ability to replace MBs under any sort of "replacement/warranty" is long gone AFAIK.

My school district is keeping them for up to 3 more years, since someone on the local school board thought it was a great idea to make us keep our desktops in service for ten years before replacing them (that means they only need to budget for 10% replacement costs each year!), but I wonder how teachers will like running WinXP on a 2.8 GHz P4 w/HT, 2 Meg of RAM and an IDE HD (any further upgrades will require capital purchases, we won't get any money for such purchases in the next year or two).

Anyway,

Lionel


Sep 3, 2010 09:53:56 PM, rescue at sunhelp.org wrote:

>On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 5:23 PM, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote:
>> In article <
>target="_blank">AANLkTinWW+4dQCzZHjR32b8Hu0K-+LRmqob2N1yQNe4q at mail.gmail.com>,
>> Ian Finder <ian.finder at gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> > I base that price on single core Dell Optiplex GX270s selling 
>for about
>$12
>> 9
>>> > on the used market.
>>> >
>>>
>>> Jesus, really? My group is about to pitch about 30 of them because
>>> we're fscking sick of them developing bad caps... We assumed they're
>>> completely worthless.
>>
>> I work with a non-profit that recycles/refurbishes computers for
>> non-profits and low income folks. They were refurbing GX270s
>> initially until they found that they all failed within a short time of
>> being refurbed. Now they're all on the recycle path.
>
>If any 270 lasted this long, it more than likely doesn't have the bad
>caps. We are talking about machines failing due to Nichicon (a really
>good manufacturer, so really something unusual) caps from a specific
>batch (2 runs to be precise), made 6 years ago. The last board with
>these caps shipped over 5 years ago and most MBs were replaced under
>warranty (they were failing within the year). The large number of
>gx270 we got back then are still running, 24/7/365, i'm pretty
>confident they dont have the faulty caps. You can contact Dell and
>check with which motherboard serial # the bad batch ended.
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