In the last couple of months, I’ve managed to sell two old, slow, five-year-old computers to people on eBay for about £100 each. The desktop wasn’t even with the monitor: it was just the PC itself. This seemed a lot of money for a computer that’s more or less unusually slow to me, but I wasn’t complaining.
What I found strange though, was that they both seemed to be sold to people who buy loads of old computers like this, and they won them after having a bidding war with other people doing the same. But I don’t get it: how can anyone possibly make any money off these things? They were pretty rubbish computers by today’s standards, and I can’t imagine anybody paying more than I got for them, so I don’t see the motivation. So does anybody have a clue about how this might work?
They’re going to harvest them for the information you left inside them, the bacteria and the fingerprints. So that they can steal your savings, frame you for murders and clone you. Worth £100 eh? Apart from the clone, obviously.
Hmm, that sounds bad. Still, a hundred pounds is a hundred pounds. Yay, money!
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You can’t be too careful.
They’ll probably format the hard-disks, install a variation of Linux and use them as network routers or fileservers/mediaservers or raid3 arrays. That’s what I do with them.
Ah, that makes sense. And sounds useful!
Yes, but why pay £100 for them? You’ll have to buy the hard drives separately anyway if you want enough capacity for a media server, and machines powerful enough for the job occasionally turn up for free on freecycle…
I have an old PC, can you get rid of it for me?
Sure, for a service fee of only £100.
Could it be something to do with a recycling scheme, I wonder?
Yeah, perhaps so. Although I think they’re reselling them, so I don’t know.
I suppose a 5 year old PC would actually be pretty serviceable – Pentium 4 etc. They maybe strip them and sell all the bits? Old memory is pricier than new
Why do people want old PCs? http://goo.gl/fb/Krs6
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