If you're willing to wait a few months, BYU has a surplus sale 2 or 3
times a year.  Actually, the prices are right around what they should
be for what you get.  It is very much a ``buyer beware'' circumstance,
since they will not accept returns.

These surplus sales are good sources for esoteric hardware.  Most of
the good mainstream stuff is snatched up by those with BYU
administrator ID cards, who get to enter an hour before the general
public.  Some 15" monitors are pretty good deals (I got a Sony and an
NEC Trinitron for $10 each); I wouldn't buy one of the 21" monitors
though, given the general condition of the equipment there (you may
get lucky, bit it's a risk).  I personally got a PCI Advansys SCSI
adapter card for $5.  The laptops are completely worthless.  The parts
inside the computers are sometimes worth more than the computers
themselves.  The older Mac's would make good GNU/Linux
firewalls/routers, since their architecture alone makes them resistent
to buffer overflow attacks (security by obscurity; nobody writes
shellcode for the PPC :-).

It's crowded, test stations are crappy, and it's generally not a fun
experience in terms of customer friendliness.  But like I said, you
get what you pay for there.

Mike

On Mon, Sep 29, 2003 at 01:49:24PM -0600, Ross Werner wrote:
> While we're on this much un-related commercial topic, ...
> 
> I've been looking for various "el-cheapo" computers. MAS computers is
> advertising 200MHZ Pentium systems for $25 apiece on their web
> site--that's a good example of what I'm looking for. (Unfortunately, I
> don't have a car, and when I did manage to get down to MAS computers they
> had two clueless guys who had no idea what computers these were that were
> listed, even though I'd called the day before to confirm that they were
> actually there.)
> 
> Does anybody know where you can get old, cheap computers like this?
> 
>   ~ Ross
> 
> 
> On Mon, 29 Sep 2003, Daniel Crookston wrote:
> 
> > I have a computer I'm selling, and I'm not sure whether protocol here
> > forbids advertising it or not.  I guess it's a bit late now, seeing as how
> > the question itself could be a bit of an advertisement.  If you're really
> > mad about this, then buy the computer, and I'll use part of the money you
> > paid to buy you donuts.
> 
> 
> 
> ____________________
> BYU Unix Users Group 
> http://uug.byu.edu/ 
> ___________________________________________________________________
> List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list

-- 
.__________________________________________________________________.
                Michael A. Halcrow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>                
           Security Engineer, IBM Linux Technology Center           
GnuPG Fingerprint: 05B5 08A8 713A 64C1 D35D 2371 2D3C FDDA 3EB6 601D

If you are too busy to read, then you are too busy. 

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