Ebay Power Buyer
Posted 12-03-2006 at 05:49 PM by comprookie2000
My day job is a golf course superintendent in south florida. I repair and rebuild laptops for fun and not much profit. I am running out of room here in my little garage apartment. Here is how it works. I buy something, most times laptops, buy the parts to fix them and try to sell them for more than I have in it. You know how some people like to save dogs or cats, I like to bring back to life non working laptops. I have even been known to rescue desktop motherboards and hard drives also. My latest find is amd64 mobile processers. Seems like they were just too hot or something because the seemed to burn up laptop motherboards alot. I get them cheap on ebay then try and find a cheap 754 motherboard for them. Then you need to take the heatsink retention bracket and remove the tabs on the bottom because the mobile processer is thiner than desktop cpu's and the heatsink will not touch it otherwise. I take a solder gun and heat up the plastic then remove the material with a razer knife. They work great. But have I saved much money. 25 for the cpu another 25 for the board (if it is good, get burned sometimes) 100 for 1 gig of good ram, another 50 or 75 for a sata drive, video card dvd/cdrw case, by the time I am done I could have bought a new one at walmart. But not as much fun and I *THINK* I am getting a great deal and am soooo smart.
repair shop
repair shop
Total Comments 1
Comments
-
I agree that repairing old computers is lots of fun. It also helps keep the landfills from accumulating so much junk. I always think it is a shame that more people don't fix up older machines, set them up with Linux, and donate them to schools and non-profit organizations. I just set up a new computer a couple of months ago. Before that, I was using a p-II 450 which worked fine for my purposes. When the hard drive went bad, I decided it was time to upgrade. Anyway, I think many of those old machines are more than adequate for the computing needs of a lot of people, and wish I knew of a way to convince them of that.
Posted 12-31-1969 at 07:00 PM by comprookie2000