Lately the City Orphanage has become crowded...

[EnigmaOne]

Around my home, it's not generally known what I do for a living; although--like many of you, I'm sure--over the years, the neighbors have adopted the habit of asking for OS help from time to time.
Again, like many of you, I'm happy to offer assistance when time permits--provided they can pay the price of listening to my Open Source evangelical rhetoric. (My neighbors are generally, yet uncharacteristically--for Long Beach--tolerant in "grinning and bearing it" gracefully.)

Often, by playing the "nice-guy" (which really makes my skin crawl, BTW), I find myself roped into doing a bit of pro-bono hardware work now and then.
By the end of the so-called "job" an offer of payment is usually refused, excluding the degree to which I incurred real-inventory expenses, of course. I suppose the "shooting the breeze" that usually happens during the course of the repairs or modifications is worth it.

The upshot of the general 'pro-bono-fix-it' scenario is one where, in the past couple of years, we have been given supposed obsolete systems, or orphaned systems have wandered their bewildered little-selves to our front doorstep.

Our latest adoption was just yesterday evening, a quaint, little Athlon system which was left in our care by a misguided individual who could not be convinced by any line of reasoning that, the Celeron system that she insisted that I repair instead, wasn't half the computer that the Athlon system represented.
Her reasoning?
She was given the Athlon/Radeon (64MB vid-mem) system by a relative, but actually went out and bought the Celeron-based/integrated graphics controller system herself. (A whole 8MB of video memory in it.)
I moved the memory and hard drives into her Celeron chassis, and she bid a good-riddance to the system that came to her free, "so it can't be as good as the one" [she] "shelled out" [her] "hard-earned cash for!" She refused the Radeon card as inferior to her own video hardware.

Oh well, I'm not one to play dictator. After installing 768MB of memory and dropping in a 30GB hard drive, this makes it something like system #14 or #15 in operation for our household (I'll bet Southern California Edison loves us), and the third dedicated gaming system for the kids. Works great, and the price was right.
What the heck, fewer fights over games makes for a calmer Daddy.

I'm thinking of applying for foster-care funding now.

Have any of you noticed that neighbors are dumping-off equipment (which is perfectly good, if not exceptionally good) on you?

[Hypz]

Im not so fortunate that people are throwing computers at me.

But I do get asked on a regular basis to fix other peoples computers. Last weekend my aunt was convinced that her old boss could read her mail. Which was not an issue since she read her mail via yahoo. After about 20 minutes I thought it faster to just agree. So for her veiwing pleasure I formated and reinstalled windows. ( Its Chistmas what am I going to do? )

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

About the closest thing to that I can recall is that I usually end up with a box full of cables after a consulting gig. I usually go into a place to fix something. Then, after it's all fixed, all of the left over parts end up in a box in my truck bed. :cool:

[DjTeriyake]

Maybe the cultural dynamics are different from Long Beach to West Covina, or maybe my neighbors don't know me since I only lived here in Southern California for a year.

"Orphans" don't really squat my front door real estate in the early hours, albeit I wish they would. That hasn't, however, deterred me from my "Free or cheap computing" ideal. The last time I spent a considerable amount of money on a computer was in 1999, when I didn't know any better and spent $400 on a motherboard/cpu upgrade. My money is of high value to me. I'm cheap when it comes to toys (read: computers for me), frugal when it comes to clothes (clearance rack only at the GAP, thrift stores), and realistic about food ($50.00 is nothing for a nice night out with my beautiful girlfriend). For the past few years it's been "inexpensive sailing" for me. My main system if now a 1 Ghz Athlon that I aquired with a cache of unused paintball tickets. A rebate here for a CD-RW, some used parts there from a swapmeet or garage sale, hookups from friends at computer stores, and good ol' fashioned "gaffling" from employers' old systems and I've got a lot of good times. Heck, I just got my first Mac from a Goodwill drop off site that I spotted while at the bank.

Now I just need to work on my social skills to get that extra bit of computational junk that my neighbors feel they don't need.

[Dutch Mafia-boy.]

Just last week - I got given to me 3 Pentium 133 - either I took them or they were going in the garbage.....it happens to me every so often during the year with people doing upgrades, and throwing the old computers away.....with me working in IT and having multiple clients I make housecalls to......

I'm always thinking "If they only knew how useful these boxes could be if there were running Linux" - their garbage is my treasure. Thanks I say!

[terribleRobbo]

Well, my old highschool recently 'put out' a small collection of boxes, by which I mean literally put out on the cleaner's table hanging around outside. It appears to be school tradition to grab said boxes, and throw them 'round the concrete area, smashing them to bits.

I managed to grab a P233, P90, an unknown (it's unbootable), and a couple of network cards before grasping, grubby mits tore the rest apart.

And they wonder why school shootings happen? Gyets...

[voidinit]

I do some freelance and contract work for small business that don't have their own IT departments. Every once in a while after an upgrade I'll ask the customer what they want done with their old equipment. Their usual response is either "I'm giving it to my employees/relatives/school" or "Get rid of it and I don't wan't to see it again."

The get rid of it scenario ends up in my closet or on my desk.

[keyshawn]

Enigmaone, wow.
That's a pretty nice neigborhood you live in :D


the only thing i've inherited [via my friend's dad] is
a 266 mhz, 1 gig h.d. and 32 mb of ram.
It's still sitting in my basement, on account, that i dont have another monitor for it yet [it'll be its own audio jukebox once i get it up, using linux of course. [dunno which distro]

ps - [my friend and i too, went and looked around to see if anyone would literally throw out their comps; only did it a few times, never found anything yet.]
it'll be a few months before i do it again
*peers outside and see the 5 inches of snow]