Guys, I am not going to lose money on this deal. Office Depot will take all the peices to recycle free of charge. I am out $1. Everything else is pure profit. Keg money.

yard sale. i think youll be pleasntly suprized at what people will buy

Didn't realize there were working computers under those monitors.

Round up your friends, make as many working computers as you can, donate them to a local charity. Go and celebrate. You do that, I'll buy the beer. PM Me - offer is on the table.

been there. fresh chemistry grad 20 years ago, i extracted gold from a whole bunch of old pre-1972 computers that used gold, platinum, etc. on the circuit boards. itwas a major pita though. paid a kid to strip the boards with heavy pliers, as i couldn't dissolve the boardsor torch them to get to just the metal components. he'd bring me 5-gallon buckets of metal alloys that i'd dissolve in aqua regia (3:1 hcl to sulphuric acid..dissolves all metals), then used a cylinder of so2 gas, bubbled into the mix to selectively preciptate gold sulfide..formed a pwder on the bottom. had to get rid of the acid and use borax (base), etc to clean it up, then made little ingots with a torch that i sold to a lapidarist (sp?). purity was about 90% at this stage. getting to 99.9%, which would draw moremoney requiredmore expensive electrolysis equipment. getting ridof the spent acids (huge resultant volumes) was an enviro problem even back in the late 80's. i'd look for a commercial outfit that does this and see what they might give for the computers before going the wet chemistry route, fwiw.

We have already started doing just that. Hoarding the ram, and doing something noble.

Thanks for the offer Don. I'll see what we can do to help the community out. We may like to drink a bit, but we can do some good here and there.
SmileWavy

Tom, what ever is left over, don't try and get at the gold. There won't be enough and it'll take too many years off of your young lives trying. PCB's are very toxic. I have to pay disposal fees (or charge my clients) for taking their old equipment and recycling it. I can't even take the steel computer cases to the local scrap yard.

The Doctor -did- get the better of you, but you seem to be 'getting' him back. Good luck selling/donating the equipment!

Dave

$1.00 Shipped????

I'll take it all...just no CRT's

Those things combined aren't worth a dollar anymore. You got hosed.

It would - however - be very cool to maybe rig up an entire wall with an array of the screens. Just for conversation purposes. I wouldn't leave it on though, the heat generated would be nuts - not to mention the power consumption. But you could make a cool project out of it.

As far as extracting the gold from those - I wouldn't. You'll likely kill yourself or make yourself very ill first from exposure to all the toxic junk on the circuit boards.

Why does this seem like a bad idea? Because it is...

Reminds me that everytime our Son goes into the woods with his friends he comes out with some new 'treasure', be it old pork rib bones, rusted barbed wire or his latest obession is 'lumber' that he finds. Actually they are rotting planks of wood that he thinks would go great in my scrap wood bin under my workbench. Little does he ever consider is the fact that all of the 'wood' he brings into the garage is being actively injested by some form of flora or fauna.

BR, your a bright kid with an active imagination and access to some very hot ladies - what say you look at the time you will spend trying to make a few bucks on that scrap and turn it into some meaningless relationships involving drunk Delta Zeta girls?

Forget extracting gold, and bag the donation route.

I wonder how much data is left on those hard drives. Believe me, there are ways of pulling data off of most 'wiped' hard drives. I seriously doubt those drives were cleaned properly - probably just a reformat, if that. Now if they over-wrote the drives with random hexzeros and ones, then the data would be gone. But most folks don't bother to do this since it takes too long, and they really don't understand how data can be destroyed.

Now I'm not saying that you should do anything shady with that stuff -- but if you present the kind doctor who sold you this stuff with the information you were able to pull off the computers, perhaps he will feel obligated to pay you for truly wiping the data. That or he may have some ex-patients to deal with....

-Z-man.

SERVER FARM.

Seriously.

Setup sorm Linux distro, or BSD, or Solaris, or Plan9, and build a giant cluster. HELL YES! That's exactly what I'd do. Minus the CRTs. I'd keep one or 2 for cluster administration purposes.

Slow,
I haven't even the faintest idea how to do that. Got a write up where I can see the process?

Tom, what he is saying is basically starting a biz that hosts webpages or stores data for clients. They are cropping up all over with no end in sight. The downside is the power consumption and AC bills you will rack up but what the heck, build it into your pricing model with a 50% slush for a rate increase.

Of course, all that juice being consumed by a college kid would draw some narc attention. Just tel them you don;t have any UV lamps for your hydroponic hemp farm, thats for smalltime chumps. No sir, you gots yo self a real live Nigerian spam camp goings on!

ah to be young with so much to work with...

Well a plan of action has been determined. A group of us are going to get together. Get them cleaned up and then donate them.

I know I am crazy for considering this, but it's what makes us feel good at the end of the day that matters. Plus, thats a boatload of much needed good karma.

It might be worth a $1 if there is old personal information such as addresses and social security numbers...

Hey if they weren't wiped right you might have a good database of all the girls to stay a good distance from.

Just sayin.;)

I bet you guys could make a really cool sculpture in that doctor's front yard in the middle of the night with 'em. :)

Set them all up in the basement, on a LAN, and resurrect an older multiplayer game. Or build a bunch of cabinets, and set them up as arcade games (MAME)

Brings back memories of college playing multiplayer "DOOM" with my roommate over PCs networked with a parallel cable. Haha! Those were great days!