It never ends.

Today, at a liquidation store in Langford, I bought these :

I thought the garage was a little empty.

They are Dell Optiplex SFF (Small Form Factor) 7040 machines, no hard drives of course, but two have a sixth generation i5-6500 cpu and the other two have very capable i7-6700 processors. Three of them had 16GB of DDR4 and one had none, each has a DVD rewriter and the motherboards are modern enough to have an m.2 slot. After a  little attention, all four of them work and I have no idea what to do with them yet. It is a sign of the times that these four potentially useful computers cost me a paltry $45 for them all, and I will do my best to save them, and others like them, from the landfill.

The scope of waste in the electronics industry is unprecedented, the store that I bought these at had probably fifty other desktops a little bit older than the ones I bought, the four I bought have sixth generation "Skylake" Intel processors and the remaining units at the store have the fourth generation "Haswell" processors from 2014 which are considered obsolete by the industry and the brainwashed buying public. If I could buy them all I would and make them into useful "office" machines, however, I realise that behaviour like that will maybe make me change the blog name from TOTG to TOCTG with the added letter indicating I have gone crazy, which I probably already have.

Anyone want to buy a camel?

Love them, new machines, even when they're not new.

For an old bloke like me, today was an exciting day, because during the week I discovered that the Victoria "Asset Investment Recovery Branch" was again open, Fridays from 9.00am through to 4.00pm, and the cash and carry was once again available to walk in plebs like myself. I did not have this blog way back in time, before covid, when this place was open, but back in the day, I bought stuff on a regular basis, mostly Lenovo branded stuff, released from the bonds of government servitude, monster machines for bread and butter money. Then of course, covid came along and spoiled all of our fun, all of it, almost every little bit of it, except for alcohol of course, covid basically just enhanced alcohol usage and streaming Netflix while it was cheap.

There is, online, lots of hate directed at Microsoft, and perhaps Intel as well, for coming up with all the machines that are considered obsolete when it comes to the massively mediocre Windows 11 operating system, because of TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot and Master Boot Records and well, the new way of doing that particular thing called GPT for newer machines, because we all need bigger storage, because, well, we do and to push back from that is silly, is it not?

This is one of those machines, in fact the last generation of the machines that are not compatible with what Microsoft deems acceptable, shame on them, all of those people, for they know not what they do.

Ok, back to me and the Asset Investment wotsit, we went there today, after having our tires rotated for the fifth time at Westshore Tires, never understood tire rotation, I am sure every time I drive that car the tires are rotated. Anyhoo, after all that bullshit we went to the Government recovery branch star chamber and bought this baby :  

This is my kind of purchase, a poor little laptop that nobody wants, the Asset Recovery people are making sure that they are recovering tax payers dollars from all the kit that has been used a bit by government employess, their technicians pull the solid state hard drive out of them for security purposes (yeah, right) and then they sell the laptops without a boot drive, but that can be bought for a few bucks and Windows 10, which is good for at least a year nowadays, can be installed and validated free, because it is baked into the UEFI of the individual machine and is quite legal.

Nuts and bolts ; this T-470s laptop, in like new condition, has 8GB of DDR4 ram and an i5-7300u CPU, has a backlit keyboard (essential for Mr. Magoo characters like myself) and a great screen, plus adapter and all that, so all I need to do is install an M.2 solid state hard drive and install an operating system, which of course will NOT be Windows 10 or 11, but will be a LInux based distro.

The laptop was $75 plus tax. I have bought a 500GB M.2 SSD for $40 and am now waiting for the nice Amazon truck person to deliver it and when it arrives I will go through the installation of the M.2 drive and then, probably perhaps, the installation of an operating system on the new (to me) baby and wonder what the hell I am going to do with it.