2024-08-21
As I stated in a previous post I have been trying to buy more stuff that it used from thrift stores and pawn shops. The pawnshop downtown is closing down and they have most stuff in the store at 60-70% off. The guy who runs this pawnshop also refurbishes old laptops and computers and He was selling off the laptops he was working on so I decided to go digging threw the bin and I found a Levonvo IdeaPad s415 for 20 bucks! The only issue with the laptop was that it needed a new battery and a power cable so I ordered a new power cable off of E-Bay and a new battery off of Amazon(I try to avoid using Amazon as much as possible, but its still very good for finding very specific things). So the total cost of the laptop was around $80. The laptop had windows 10 installed on it so I replaced that bloat/spy wear with a minimum install of Debian 12 with Icewm as the desktop environment. Over all the laptop runs perfectly for a 10 year old budget level laptop, its a bit slow when loading firefox(its a 1ghz cpu) buts its not super slow either.
Another thing the guy had on sale was a bunch of HP t620 for 20 dollars as well. These are very minimal computers with a small cpu(1ghz), 4gb of ram and 16gb of memory, but they support HD graphics and consume about 65 watts of power when on. I thought that hey, this would be a good thing to use to hook up to my TV and use to play movies and stuff from amazon prime instead of buying a raspberry PI 5(Which costs 150 dollars). So I decided to buy that as well. I had to buy a display port to HDMI cable for it and I had initially installed Alpine Linux on it(I might use this as my minimal Linux distro in the future), however I could not get the sound to output to my TV for some reason and did not feel like fucking around with it for hours on end, so I decided to just install Manjaro on it. So I did some testing on it and I was pretty surprised that it is able to handle x265 encoded videos(which tends to lag on devices with integrated graphics). I also plan on installing a n64 emulator on it and maybe hooking up a portable DVD drive it to and try to play PS3 games on it(Which is probably going to be pushing it). Before I got the HP-620 I was using a very budget Dell Laptop my friend gave me to play stuff on my tv. So I am thinking of turning that into a server of some sorts, maybe running pi-hole plus a couple of other services on it.
Other then the computers I got, they had a bunch of hard drives and PS3 games for sale, I picked up a couple of 320gb HDDs, which I'm probably going to use as removable storage and a couple of PS3 Games all for 40 bucks. I do need a new set of speakers for my computer the set I have now, that I bough off a college class mate in 2006 are starting to go, so I might go back there end of August to see what I can get.
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