So I picked up a handful (6) old Dell laptops from Apex Surplus last week. These were some corporations issue-laptops that employee got to abuse for many years until they decided to upgrade en mass. The PCs were sterilized by simply yanking out the hard drives and they were dumped as scrap. Since they are very old (D600 class) laptops, with a lot of miles on them, they really aren't much good at running contemporary multimedia or cpu-intensive apps. My price was about $20 each, and new hard drives cost about $50. A few moments spent installing open-source Ubuntu on them, and voila!
This was a fun few days or piecing together enough parts to get them running, plus researching Ubuntu and looking for old Dell BIOS upgrades. At one point I had to create a bootable floppy (!) with the BIOS loader on it. Reflect for a moment on how hard it is to find a blank 3.5" floppy disk these days. Yes, I happened to have some handy, and even managed to remember how to make a bootable MS-DOS image on one. That part was actually harder than you might think, and it involved an ISO image that i had to modify by hand. Arcane Knowledge, for-the-win!
So now I have four extremely low-end laptops running Ubuntu, which is surprisingly full-featured and lightweight. These machines are back in business again after a year in a scrap pile. Alex suggests I link them into a Beowulf cluster. If you know what that is, you are probably laughing right now.
more likely I will simply give them to a few friends who could really use a working laptop around the house. They will make great stocking-stuffers. I'll probably save one for myself to play with; Linux machines are very useful for a lot of dirty close-to-the-metal tasks that Windows/Macs just aren't up for. I'll also try to make one into a media and storage server for the home LAN. Ok, back to work for me.
