This probably only pertains to folks in the US.
Anyone else out there on the Freecycle lists? For those who don't know what it is, it is an email network (Yahoo) where folks can offer stuff or request stuff -- the only catch is that it has to be FREE. It is pretty much concentrated only to your own particular town, or in my case, county.
Scored my second free laptop computer today via Freecycle. All I did was ask.
The first one was an Averatec 3150 with a busted display. Seems the owner busted the screen while deployed in Iraq and had left it with his mother to dispose of. Yielded some good parts (DVD-CDRW, 40 gig hard drive, 512 mb RAM card). I can probably sell the motherboard on eBay for about $100 later. Even the case is worth some eBay money.
Today an HP Pavilion 485 dropped into my lap. The owner said it booted up then shut down. When I booted up I noticed an install menu for PC-BSD, and sure enough there was an install CD in the DVD-CDRW. My guess is that PC-BSD didn't play well with the AMD Athlon 4 processor, but that is only a guess. Guess the husband must have blown away the Windows 2000 and broke it (for him) during a BSD install.
So ... PCLOS 2007 has been loaded onto it and I am already an hour into distro update w/out a hint of problems.
This will be the wife's computer. I bought a Dell D400 on eBay Saturday night.
Don
