Good news about older laptops

While the vast majority of even core 2 duo laptops have gone to the scrap I thought I'd share some good info. Obviously besides hard drives and ram...I am finding good use for T and P series CPUs. A regular buyer of mine has told me they are particularly useful as ASIC (application specific integreated circuit). I do not know specifics, nor do I particularly care. Pretty much any Txxxx or Pxxxx laptop cpu with 2.0GHz or higher speed qualifies.

Another thing, and I know it's a bit of a stretch, but be on the look out for Intel Centrino-N wifi cards, those have value too. they call them micro PCI form factor, about the size of two quarters side by side.



I thought this would help you guys out who are stripping laptops for cost effective reasons. If you have anything to add that isn't the obvious like screens ram and hard drives, feel free to add it.

This is even more of a stretch, but for some laptops, check the value of the hard drive caddies. Garden variety Dell Latitude D630s won't have value there, but older Panasonic Toughbook caddies can be worth a lot of money.

You'd need to at a minimum figure out the makes and models of the wireless cards. They look pretty similar. The Centrino wireless cards were made by Intel, opposed to cards made by Broadcom or Atheros. I don't know off hand what models were Centrino-N cards, though.

I'll leave the rest to Armygreywolf. Laptop wireless cards are not anything that I currently deal in.

I thought I'd generate some interest, get some other people who do the buying around her to chime in on anything they might be looking for and then we could all point people in the right directions. I plan to update my list COMPLETELY on thursday to be as comprehensive as possible (and printable).

Centrino-N says exactly that right on the sticker. I am going to pull one and take a picture for everyone. I prefer this for personal laptop refurbs because centrino-N is the most reliable, longest range version of wifi available for laptops imho.

Some XP machines are just as new, if not newer than a lot of the Vista machines. Home machines tended to get more of the "Shiny" stuff (Including Vista) than the business machines, which stuck with the tried and true Windows XP after Vista was released.

AMD serves a very valuable purpose. Without them, what do you think would keep the prices of Intel CPUs down. The AM3 architecture is dated, and the last two new PCs I built are Intel machines. But, if AM4 is a good socket, I'll gladly go back to the red camp....

AM4 architecture looks to be a door buster. Do some research it looks like they are going to run DDR4 on individual channels for each slot, instead of pairing. It would also mean you could run registered ddr4...and if you thought X99 was fast...oofta.

This is a situation where I can sell them above market on ebay...for the most part. The guy who wants them is building miner rigs. I have no idea how he is changing a core 2 cpu to an asic chip except to guess he's taking advantage of its ability to handle thousands of threads at once....kind of the trademark of the centrino and core 2 architecture is that they sacrifice efficiency for ability to process off the bus as fast as it can be fed to the cpu. If I had to guess how I would say he is doing it...pre and post numerical processing, texas instruments makes a rather excellent math co processor rated at less than an 1/8th watt TDP each... take a standard 12 inch finger card PCB and you can probably load 10 or even 20 CPUs and another 8 co processors then flip it over for all the memory...a miner rig is for the bitcoin stuff, which is steadily eclipsing what the average user can hash and still turn a profit against their electric bill.