Christmas 2024 Thrifting - Back to Home
A couple weeks ago, while out of town with some family, I decided to go out thrifting for some computer junk. I never go to thrift shops, because the ones around me are usually just clothes & furniture. But, since I was visiting a bigger city, I decided to go to a few of the larger chain thrift stores & look at the electronics.
The first store had very little, other than some mediocre monitors & printers. As expected, printers made up a large section of the electronics aisle at all the stores. I think most of them were under 10 dollars, and still no one wants them.
The second store had the most stuff by far, including this very nice IBM ThinkCentre desktop for 30 dollars. I was really close to buying it, but decided against it, since other than being IBM, it's almost identical to any other Pentium 4 machine I already have. Maybe if I ever go back & it's still there, I'll buy it.
It says "Model: X3M" on the side, but there doesn't seem to be any IBM PC with that model, so I must be missing something. I would hope that the store wiped the original Windows install for privacy reasons, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was untouched.
A big reason why there's not as many PCs at thrift shops is that many stores don't even accept PCs, because they are too dumb or lazy to wipe the HDDs; thus, they end up at the dump, which is unfortunate. One day, I hope to find an e-scrap facility that's actually willing to sell stuff to me.
The same store had a whole rack of keyboards, but none of them were even mildly interesting.
There was, however, a Disney computer desk, a matching pink keyboard, and a different non-matching junky keyboard & monitor. I have no idea why they didn't put the random black keyboard & monitor with the rest of the computer stuff.
The only other thing of note was the abundance of cheap speakers. This very cheap fake wooden set was the only one I got a picture of, but I saw quite a few other cheap, possibly "white van" speaker sets. I can't think of any use for speakers that junky, other than to intentionally blow out for fun.
Those photos were from only 2 different stores, because the 3rd store had absolutely nothing of interest. I might be going back sooner rather than later, so the thrift store adventures might not be over.
Until then, merry Christmas to all. Hopefully 2025 brings us even more computer adventures. Thank you all for the support over the past 4 years. The site is at almost 60,000 total views, which is incredible.