What do with old office shit?

So I've come into a pile of about 30 of these, around a dozen other, newer(Up to win 7) towers and around 20 misc laptops. Including a couple thinkpads. Also a few servers with like, a hundred 73gb hdds between them all, the racks they were in, and a few miles of cat5.

All the harddrives have been ripped out, and they've been sitting collecting dust for a while. Nothing newer then 8 years old from the quick look I did.

Is there anything worth salvaging other then the server rack enclosures themselves? I imagine they only left crap behind, and the enclosures themselves since they were bolted into concrete.

cluster supercomputer

It's all trash. Unless you want to rack up a quadruple digit electricity bill.

Yeah, what I was thinking.

Found myself in a similar situation a while ago.

Sadly anything newer than Pentium 3 but older than Core2 is completely useless (terrible performance at massive power draw).

You might be able to keep a few of the newer ones around if they're Core2's and use them as thin clients/streaming machines, but that's about it. They still use a lot of power for relatively poor performance.

I ended up just pulling drives and cables from all of mine and progressively tossing the rest in dumpsters.

Thinkpads could be semi-worthwhile depending on model. I think some people are working on custom (modern) boards for the X60 chassis, and possibly X40 as well? If anything has 1600x1200 screens be sure to save those.

Are they all Pentium 4?

Forgot to add. You could recover gold from these! Might be worth your time. You can get quite a bit of gold from all these PCs. It's also not very hard to do.

Most of the non-optiplex ones are core2. . And they seem to all had their drives pulled. The only drives left are all the 73gb swapables in the servers. No idea the screen size. I only had time to look around a bit.

the optiplex ones are all p4. You saying I should tear out all the cpus before getting rid of them?

Yea and maybe the RAM. You could get a bunch of gold from all of them.

How many C2D machines do you have?

I don't like, prob like 20 including laptops? There was a literal pile of the shit in the loading dock.

Ah because C2D machines are still usable and not bad. Yea just recover gold from them.

Well I'd definitely take the Thinkpads to check them out. As far as laptops go, Pentium M/CD/C2D would all be totally usable.

The Opti GX270s were total crap. They're the only model Optiplex I would consider bad. The capacitors always swelled and leaked. I had a shit-ton of MB swaps.

extract the gold from the processor and save it in a bucket it will pay off when you retire.

Don't listen to this. It'll cost more to get that gold out then it's worth. Even if you don't value the time. Just toss them all, or phone a recycle place to come pick it up.

But this is right. Check the thinkpads before you toss them.

I would love one of those Thinkpads you say you got!

>It'll cost more to get that gold out then it's worth
True now that I think of it, but if the machines are free and he can find the acids for cheap somehow it's worth it. Otherwise I guess eh. Probably not worth his time.

This guy is right, those models were the poster child for the capacitor plague, google it, dell got sued over it. Every one of these machines died eventually as the capacitors failed.

Tl:dr Chinese company stole incomplete formula for capacitors, sold defective capicitors to motherboard manufactures, capacitors died.

Man you'd be surprised. at work we had 200 dell blade servers with core 2 duo era dual quad core xeons in them. We threw them away. I mean they were taken away by some kind of disposal company, but you know that company got paid to take them and then they sold them on eBay.

Use these for a learning experience.

Get them to net boot off a central server. Set these up as a high reliability system for, say, email with distributed storage.

Office machines are usually quiet so it shouldn't be too noisy.

Build a small cluster for educational purposes out of some of the SFF desktops, use them as servers, test boxes, legacy archivers, whatever.

Donate the rest you don't want. Don't bother listening to the retards in here whining about power consumption, all they know how to do is regurgitate the ebin housefire meme even though most of those chips peaked around the same or less as most modern mid-range desktop chips, they're just inefficient with the power they draw, but hardly a wallet breaker as long as they meet your expectations. Dedicated hardware is a fun motivator for mucking around in a lot of otherwise mundane subjects of computing.

>he can find the acids for cheap somehow it's worth it
If it was that simple then everyone would be doing it, there's no gold in this shit anyway.

Do you have a big 48port switch?

I would hook all of these fuckers up to one and PXE boot all of them into HDT and check the processors. If there are any decent boxes with Core 2 Quads.

small? you're building a cluster. Go big or go home.