Dumpster Diving

Roommate R really cracks me up sometimes. A few days ago, R took out the trash to find a computer sitting beside the dumpster at our apartment complex.

R has an affinity for dumpster diving. Apparently he learned it from his father and, later in life during college, he would perfect this skill by pulling out many chunked valuables from dumpsters at the end of the school year. A few months ago, he pulled out a Webber charcoal grill and two bags of charcoal. He has since grilled many a steak on that little webber.

I also have to say that R was currently using a decade-old hunk of a doorstop to write his doctoral dissertation. It's painful for me to watch --- I couldn't imagine how painful the thing must be to use. Oh yeah, and he's poor and too cheap to buy a new computer.

But he wasn't getting his hopes up too much with this dumpster computer. He pulled it out and asked me if I could salvage it for any good parts. So we took off the case and plugged it in to see if it would power up. Which it did, but it let out beeps of agony when we hit the switch. So we turned it off.

All of the components were there except for the RAM, which I found one DIMM stuck to the bottom of the case and another RAM DIMM that must have fell out of it because it was on the floor. I inserted the RAM DIMMs and turned it on. The computer hummed happily without a chirp.

So I said, "hey, this thing might actually work". So I plugged up a monitor and keyboard/mouse and it booted up. I found that the previous owner seemed to know a bit about computers and (s)he deleted all of the files, but left windows and some other programs. And with a minor jumper setting change, we used the DVD/CD drive (yes, a DVD drive) to load the 5$ office 2000 disk that R got through PISD.

And voila! It turns out to have a P-II 400Mhz, 128MB RAM, ~20gig HD, CD/DVD ROM, with sound, modem, NIC, and video cards. Someone must have thrown it out when they bought a newer computer. Roommate R now has a ~5 year old computer instead of a ~10+ year old computer to finish composing his doctoral thesis. All free and courtesy of our very own apartment dumpster.