Forums | MacLife
You are not logged in.
#1 2009-11-05 8:00 pm
Dude, I got a Dell
A few days ago I was herping by Salt Creek. Suddenly a pickup truck saw me and tore off. I was a little puzzled, am I really that ugly?
I soon found out why he tore off - he just made an illegal dump pile.
Most of it was womens clothing, but on top of one the piles of clothing was a Dell Optiplex GX50. Other than the cdrom missing it's faceplate It looked in good condition. The low profile pci covers were missing, and I could see it still had the ram and cpu inside it.
Computers have some nasty stuff in them environmentally, so I decided if it was really junk, at least I could dispose of it properly.
Carried it to bus stop and took bus home. Opened it up, the heat sink was dislodged - but the clip / mount was not broken. The cpu was not burned, so it hadn't been run that way.
Sticker says Celeron but the CPU is a PIII - not a Celeron. It has 384MB of RAM. Optical drive is a laptop cdrom, not dvd.
I cleaned the cpu and heat sink, attached it, and attempted to boot. Bios identified it as a GX150 - not a GX50 - I guess it had a mobo swap, probably why it has a P3 and not a Celeron. Bios complained the hard drive was questionable, and suggested I back it up. I hit F1 to boot anyway, Windows XP starts to boot but fails, complaining of NTFS errors etc. I'm guessing that's why it was dumped, it isn't worth the cost of a new hard drive. But I have several PATA drives, I was planning to swap anyway since the drive it had was only 30GB 5400 RPM and I have a 80GB 7200 RPM Seagate not in use.
Put drive in, and tried to install Ubuntu. The Ubuntu installer kept failing at random places, so I ran memtest86 - several hours later, no errors, so the memory and cpu seem to be OK. The optical drive is bum. I don't have a local Ubuntu mirror, but I do have local CentOS mirror, so I burned a 4MB boot.iso and did a network install of CentOS 5.4. Worked beautifully.
Now it is sitting headless next to my other headless server, running CentOS, waiting for me to turn it into my new media server.
It's going to hold my audio/video files and stream them to my other computers. I need to buy a low profile PCI SATA controller so I can slap some external disks on it to hold the files.
Dude, I got a Dell!
In her right hand Jenny held the Bible of her mother
Jenny had a pistol in the other
-- Steve Taylor
Offline
#3 2009-11-05 8:28 pm
Re: Dude, I got a Dell
It isn't specified if he did or did not ad-hoc dumpster dive any further items....
Nice pull, Res. If only you had the means to record the truck's plate number and report the illegal dump to the authorities.
There's what you love to do, and then there's what you get paid to do. Those two things are often different.
Offline
#4 2009-11-05 8:29 pm
Re: Dude, I got a Dell
mackerm wrote:
So, you didn't take the women's clothing.
They just didn't match my shoes.
In her right hand Jenny held the Bible of her mother
Jenny had a pistol in the other
-- Steve Taylor
Offline
#5 2009-11-05 8:55 pm
Re: Dude, I got a Dell
That's cool, but... a Pentium III? Somebody tried to give me a laptop with a PIII in it, and I politely declined.
It is funny that the guy took off so abruptly. Maybe he thought you were a park ranger or state trooper or something? It'd be pretty sweet if you could use the original hard drive to sleuth his identity.
"It's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy."
--Steve Jobs
Offline
#6 2009-11-05 9:25 pm
- radarman
- Member
- Registered: 2005-02-28
- Posts: 3584
Re: Dude, I got a Dell
Bren wrote:
That's cool, but... a Pentium III? Somebody tried to give me a laptop with a PIII in it, and I politely declined.
It is funny that the guy took off so abruptly. Maybe he thought you were a park ranger or state trooper or something? It'd be pretty sweet if you could use the original hard drive to sleuth his identity.
I suspect the dumper was not the owner. It sounds a lot like he was dumping stolen items.
However, it was a PIII; so maybe he really was the owner and didn't want to pay a disposal fee...
That said, I have an Inspiron 2500 with a 1GHz P3 in it. It's actually not a bad little laptop. I've got a honkin battery in it, and it will run for hours. Surfs the web better than any netbook I've run across, and outlasts a good number of them as well.
Last edited by radarman (2009-11-05 9:27 pm)
Offline
#7 2009-11-05 9:32 pm
- wellfleation
- High on Life

- From: Metheun, Mass.
- Registered: 2001-11-13
- Posts: 8672
Re: Dude, I got a Dell
Your smurfing MacGyver. GOOOOOOD FOR UUUUUUUUUUU.
FIGHT
POWEROffline
#8 2009-11-05 10:45 pm
Re: Dude, I got a Dell
I chuckle whenever I think of having to pay a disposal fee. As previously mentioned (in a previous thread), there's a place in South San Francisco which pays cold, hard cash for the privilege of taking your electronic junk off their hands. Of the various types of e-waste they pay for, the highest per-pound rate they pay is for computer motherboards. The next highest is for computers that are still in their cases.
"It's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy."
--Steve Jobs
Offline
#9 2009-11-05 10:50 pm
Re: Dude, I got a Dell
Bren wrote:
I chuckle whenever I think of having to pay a disposal fee. As previously mentioned (in a previous thread), there's a place in South San Francisco which pays cold, hard cash for the privilege of taking your electronic junk off their hands. Of the various types of e-waste they pay for, the highest per-pound rate they pay is for computer motherboards. The next highest is for computers that are still in their cases.
Shades of the "Dead Cow Story" thread: http://www.maclife.com/forums/topic/113753
Offline
#10 2009-11-05 11:19 pm
Re: Dude, I got a Dell
But none of my stories involved anything being inserted in, or retrieved from, a cadaver's nether throat.
Well, none of the stories I'm willing to tell you about.
"It's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy."
--Steve Jobs
Offline
#12 2009-11-06 12:26 am
Re: Dude, I got a Dell
This is Resedit. We challenged him to acquire a media server out in the wilderness, and we told him, 'You find it, you keep it!'
Congratulations Res, it's a PC!
"It's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy."
--Steve Jobs
Offline
#13 2009-11-06 12:34 am
- Pithecanthropus
- Roast Master

- From: St. Cloud, MN
- Registered: 2002-12-30
- Posts: 4448
- Website
Re: Dude, I got a Dell
Oooh! You can access their credit card numbers.
And old porn.
Seriously, though, could you find their address in there somewhere and turn them in for illegal dumping?
Last edited by Pithecanthropus (2009-11-06 12:35 am)
Grandfatherly advice: You can drink 'em pretty, but you can't drink 'em smart.
Offline
#15 2009-11-06 4:28 am
Re: Dude, I got a Dell
Bren wrote:
That's cool, but... a Pentium III? Somebody tried to give me a laptop with a PIII in it, and I politely declined.
It is funny that the guy took off so abruptly. Maybe he thought you were a park ranger or state trooper or something? It'd be pretty sweet if you could use the original hard drive to sleuth his identity.
I wouldn't use a PIII for a desktop.
I still use my Thinkpad T20 but only for light browsing without flash and JavaScript. It's going to be disposed of soon, battery only lasts 40 minutes now.
But for simple serving of files, you don't need a lot of power.
I already have a LAN server, a 1.6 GHz Duron, it mirrors CentOS + updated (both i386 and x86_64), acts as my lan sql server, dns server, imap server (it pops my pop accounts and then serves them as iMap so I can read my mail from anywhere), etc. - but that system has all the internal hard drives used and the only empty PCI slots do not work so I can't use it as a media server because it just doesn't have the disk space to add that to it's list of duties.
The task I have lined up for it does not require a lot of CPU speed or RAM (it's i815 chipset so 512MB is the max) and the crappy integrated video card doesn't matter because it's headless, and in some respects is a benefit because it doesn't generate much heat.
The only downside is that it only has two low profile PCI cards. That means for external SATA I am stuck at SATA I - but SATA I is more than fast enough. I also may be stuck at 100MB ethernet, I don't know if gigabit is available in low profile pci cards. But it's fast enough to serve media faster than it plays, it just means it will take a little longer to upload media to it.
In her right hand Jenny held the Bible of her mother
Jenny had a pistol in the other
-- Steve Taylor
Offline
#16 2009-11-06 11:28 am
- jerwin
- Sophist
- From: The Garden of Pure Ideology
- Registered: 2003-01-01
- Posts: 7022
Re: Dude, I got a Dell
resedit wrote:
I also may be stuck at 100MB ethernet, I don't know if gigabit is available in low profile pci cards. But it's fast enough to serve media faster than it plays, it just means it will take a little longer to upload media to it.
1000baseT, low Profile, works with Linux
... you might want to shop around some, though.
Last edited by jerwin (2009-11-06 11:32 am)
Some subjects actually enjoy pain, and withhold information they might otherwise have divulged in order to be punished.
Central Intelligence Agency. (1983). Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual
Offline
#18 2009-11-06 1:23 pm
- bedstuy
- Archimandrite, Eastern Elite

- From: King Cole Bar, St. Regis Hotel
- Registered: 2003-09-20
- Posts: 13620
Offline
#19 2009-11-06 1:45 pm
- mrreet2001
- Member

- From: NW Ohio
- Registered: 2005-05-25
- Posts: 4320
- Website
Re: Dude, I got a Dell
bedstuy wrote:
I had to look up "herping"
They don't let you out of minithink much do they.
2.66Ghz QuadCore-Nehalem w/24"LED CD ---2.2Ghz BlackMB---15" 2.4Ghz MBP(work)
Dual 2.3Ghz G5 (4G Ram, 2x 250G HD)(10.5 server)--- 400Mhz G4 PM (10.4 Server)
1.5GHz Powerbook---1.6Ghz G5 iMac
"So he fels down in a poisoning gas."
Offline
#20 2009-11-06 3:13 pm
- sturner
- Royal High Poobah
- Moderator

- From: Carrollton, TX USA
- Registered: 2000-01-31
- Posts: 13767
Re: Dude, I got a Dell
We keep him chained up in the oubliette
I'm not dead yet.
There are 3 types of people, those who can count and those who can't.
"There are few things graven in stone, excepting your date of death."
Offline
#21 2009-11-06 3:41 pm
Re: Dude, I got a Dell
Argh! The PCI bus is older 33MHz bus - which means it won't even reach SATA I speed.
I think SATA I cards will still work in it, though. I'll have to check.
In her right hand Jenny held the Bible of her mother
Jenny had a pistol in the other
-- Steve Taylor
Offline
#22 2009-11-06 4:34 pm
- radarman
- Member
- Registered: 2005-02-28
- Posts: 3584
Re: Dude, I got a Dell
resedit wrote:
Argh! The PCI bus is older 33MHz bus - which means it won't even reach SATA I speed.
I think SATA I cards will still work in it, though. I'll have to check.
Max bandwidth for 33MHz PCI is 133MB/s. Max bandwidth for SATA-1 is 150MB/s. Velociraptor EL-150 - 88MB/s. You might be able to do a bit better with the VR-150, which is SATA-2, but it will necessarily throttle on a SATA-1 controller. Even if you could manage SATA-2 on that rig, you still wouldn't be maxing out the bus on sustained transfers (though you would be close)
That said, the burst rate will probably get close to the actual 150MB/s, at which point your PCI bus will become the bottle-neck at ~120MB/s. (The PCI bus overhead is fairly high)
I wouldn't worry about it. You can stream video easily off of that machine with the right disks and controllers.
Offline
#23 2009-11-06 4:46 pm
Re: Dude, I got a Dell
Yeah - I'm definitely getting SATAII disks even though SATAI controllers are all that are available because when the power supply, cpu, or board on this thing dies - I'll just replace the unit, so the external disks should be SATAII.
I need to do my homework, not all SATA chipsets are well supported. I need to find one that is well supported with the RHEL/CentOS kernel (which tends not to be bleeding edge for drivers).
In her right hand Jenny held the Bible of her mother
Jenny had a pistol in the other
-- Steve Taylor
Offline
#24 2009-11-07 5:33 am
- geekette28
- Southpaw Extraordinare

- Registered: 2006-12-26
- Posts: 356
Re: Dude, I got a Dell
Resedit, you need to contact the Discovery Channel. It's like Survivorman, Crocodile Hunter, MacGyver, and Dirty Jobs all in one. Go out looking for lizards, and end the day repurposing computers! But what will they call it?
Commit random acts of nerdiness and senseless acts of dorkdom
Offline

