2 great finds a week apart

A few weeks ago, I was driving along and I saw a computer on the curb. Not your ordinary computer, it had a water cooler mounted to it. I took it home and hooked it up and it beeped when I turned it on. I figured the RAM was bad, then I noticed that the beeping coincided with a flashing light in the water cooler. It was low on water so I set it aside. It was kick butt for it's day, but it was an XP machine so not a top of the line computer anymore. Oh, it had ganged video cards as well. 2 video cards tied together.

A week later I get a call from a local charity thrift store that calls me when they get computers that are not running. I give them $5 per tower even though I have dropped my tower price typically for normal towers. I went and grabbed it. It was heavy. I flipped her $5 and grabbed it. I did not look at it more until I got home. It is an HP X800 work station. I have never seen one of these ever. I start looking at it and see that it has a windows 7 pro sticker on it. Always a good sign when looking for more sellable parts. It also says xeon which can be good

I opened it up and was disappointed right away that there was no hard drive in it. I was happy though that it had 4 slots for hard drives. Then I start poking around. It has 2 processor slots, but only one is filled. After further investigation it is a quad core chip and the machine is actually a server that can accept 2-6 core chips if so desired. Then comes the RAM. The machine calls for ECC, but it has regular RAM in it which is good, because I need a machine to test PC3 RAM. It has 12 slots for RAM and is upgradable to 96gb of RAM. This machine however had only 3 sticks of 2gb in it.

So, I look at the power supply. This thing is monstrous! I check the part number on ebay and it regularly goes for $250 or better. Now I know I have something cool, but with no hard drive, there is no use in plugging it in. This machine was configurable to spend as much as you wanted on it and goes for around $500 as is if it were running.

Fast forward a few days and I have a college kid friend that I give good parts to and he sells me his burned up stuff. We always make good trades back and forth as well. He fixes and sells computers to make ends meet while he finishes school. I showed him the water cooler computer and he fell in love with it. I ended up giving that to him in exchange for him taking the X800 and putting a hard drive in it and installing a fresh copy of windows 7. It works great! And he filled the water in the cooler on the other computer and was able to get it up and running for himself with some problems, but it will have good parts of value even if it falters on him.

Long story short, I am going to flip the lady at the thrift store some extra money the next time I see her so she knows that I will come clean with value on her when I get something great. It is a thrift store for a no kill animal shelter. I don't mind kicking extra when it is warranted. Some would say different as that is the deal I have with them, but it is a charity I support and want to ensure she keeps dealing with me and not the next guy that comes along.