Endless/Nameless Posted April 3, 2016 Share Posted April 3, 2016 Post your out-of-date or rather pointless tech that you really had no business spending money on. I got this 10-year-old Dell D420 for $55; going to use it for watching DVD's in bed and the occasional odd job that I can't perform at my iMac. I could have just got a dedicated portable DVD player, but they're all junk, and I'm actually saving money buying this. And it can do more, besides. Windows 7 Home Premium, 2.5gb RAM, 12" widescreen display, magnesium-alloy frame, expanded 9-cell battery, media dock, brand-new 30gb hard drive--pretty decent little machine actually. It has biometric security which I thought was pretty cool, but after several hours of trying to getting the drivers to work, I gave up. The security software wanted to implement a boot password and bunch of other bullshit that would have actually slowed down the login process anyway, so fuck that. ^^^Seller said there was a big gouge that should get covered so I thought why not and had this printed up heheheh^^^ I also have a Palm Pilot for some reason. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ArielMT Posted April 3, 2016 Share Posted April 3, 2016 (edited) Don't feel bad about the Pilot. I bought a Palm IIIc in Y2K, and I'm still using it today. But you may have a bit of trouble finding apps for that Pilot, since a lot of stuff still around today is for PalmOS 3.0 or newer. Edit: Unless that's a III-series or V-series. It looks newer than mine. I think my last dumb tech purchase was a prepaid smartphone. I'm surprised I haven't destroyed it yet. Edited April 3, 2016 by ArielMT Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Endless/Nameless Posted April 3, 2016 Author Share Posted April 3, 2016 1 minute ago, ArielMT said: Don't feel bad about the Pilot. I bought a Palm IIIc in Y2K, and I'm still using it today. But you may have a bit of trouble finding apps for that Pilot, since a lot of stuff still around today is for PalmOS 3.0 or newer. It's a cool little device. But i was a little disappointed at the stylus sensitivity/accuracy; I thought I could use it like a kind of digital notepad, but no... Paper/keyboard still more efficient. 1 minute ago, ArielMT said: I think my last dumb tech purchase was a prepaid smartphone. I'm surprised I haven't destroyed it yet. Oh my God, some of those are shit. I had a little prepaid android once that could barely run itself out of the box. 8 minutes ago, ArielMT said: Edit: Unless that's a III-series or V-series. It looks newer than mine. I think it's actually a Palm TX, now that i think about it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ArielMT Posted April 3, 2016 Share Posted April 3, 2016 Just now, Endless/Nameless said: Oh my God, some of those are shit. I had a little prepaid android once that could barely run itself out of the box. I have no idea why I forgot, but I just remembered: One prepaid I bought on the cheap, which wasn't on clearance, actually ran out of space during the out-of-box experience. The first thing it did after it went through the wi-fi setup stage was update all its installed apps automatically and without the ability to stop, and it got only half-way before an army of space errors marched across the status bar. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Endless/Nameless Posted April 3, 2016 Author Share Posted April 3, 2016 8 minutes ago, ArielMT said: I have no idea why I forgot, but I just remembered: One prepaid I bought on the cheap, which wasn't on clearance, actually ran out of space during the out-of-box experience. The first thing it did after it went through the wi-fi setup stage was update all its installed apps automatically and without the ability to stop, and it got only half-way before an army of space errors marched across the status bar. That sounds about right!! I hate the ones that make a distinction between "system memory" and "storage". My mom had one once that would only let you install about 5 apps because it forced part of the appdata to be installed on an extremely small partition of the internal storage labels "system memory", and once that filled up, that was it. No more apps, plus performance went down drastically if i recall. Adding an SD card didn't help, because it still insisted on keeping parts of the app in that tiny spot. Plus, any updates to system apps piled on top of each other in that same space. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DrDingo Posted April 3, 2016 Share Posted April 3, 2016 Once when I was a stupid child I bought RAM for my laptop because I thought it would go faster God, I was such a moron 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jerry Posted April 5, 2016 Share Posted April 5, 2016 I don't exactly BUY, but I do keep tons of old computers. One's a laptop that's obscure to the point of being fascinating. It's a Seanix Seanote D400S. It's got a desktop Pentium 4 and many peripherals that I have yet to get operational under Lubuntu, like the audio chipset and a Wi-Fi PCMCI card. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Victor-933 Posted April 5, 2016 Share Posted April 5, 2016 I bought an HP TC1100 back in about 2013 and used the hell out of it. Thing is, the TC1100 was discontinued in 2005. For the price, though, it was a steal -- 1ghz single-core Pentium M, 1.5GB RAM (I upgraded one slot, fuck dismantling that thing to reach the other one) and an Nvidia Geforce 420 Go GPU with 32MB VRAM, in a highly portable "hybrid tablet PC" configuration with Wacom digitizer... all for $130, including the optical drive dock. I ended up nuking the GPU because the TC1100 has hilariously bad cooling and then just bought another TC1100 sans goodies for like $40. All the non-3D digital art in my gallery ( example ) was done on them... In hindsight maybe it wasn't all that dumb... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LazerMaster5 Posted April 5, 2016 Share Posted April 5, 2016 Most of my assorted tech goodies are old computer parts I got for free. Does anyone need an old HDD? I did buy some ancient webcam from Salvation Army, only to find it is incompatible with Windows 7. I have a PS2 I got from a rummage sale for $20. The lid sensor is shot, but if I had a soldering kit I could fix it. It would make a fun console to mod. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sutekh_the_Steak Posted April 5, 2016 Share Posted April 5, 2016 I bought an N64 once just to play Banjo-Kazooie, before I knew what emulation was. I was about 15. lol I've still got it actually so I might just sell it, and keep the controller for emulating N64 games on my laptop. idk if anyone would want an N64 without the controller though Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sidewalk Surfboard Posted April 5, 2016 Share Posted April 5, 2016 2 hours ago, Sutekh_the_Steak said: I bought an N64 once just to play Banjo-Kazooie, before I knew what emulation was. I was about 15. lol I've still got it actually so I might just sell it, and keep the controller for emulating N64 games on my laptop. idk if anyone would want an N64 without the controller though Why don't you just buy more games for it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sutekh_the_Steak Posted April 5, 2016 Share Posted April 5, 2016 41 minutes ago, Sidewalk Surfboard said: Why don't you just buy more games for it? It's a PAL N64 so most of the games would run slower. Plus the games would run in 1080p when emulated. Then again there is something nicer about playing games on the original hardware so I'm still torn about whether I should sell it or not. If I were to emulate it though I would only get ROMs for games that aren't available on the Wii U virtual console, it's the better thing to do ethics-wise to buy them where possible. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Victor-933 Posted April 6, 2016 Share Posted April 6, 2016 I didn't actually purchase these, but I do own them, and they do definitely fall under the purview of this thread's "outdated" qualifier. The big ugly fat fuck on bottom is a Compaq Portable One, designed in 1983 and weighing close to 30lbs. I haven't been able to get a boot disk for it so I don't know how well it actually works, but it does power on (and sounds like a damn jet airliner spooling up). It seems to have been upgraded with an aftermarket hard drive; from what I've read the ones that shipped with HDDs were a sort of "elite" model with a gold nameplate instead of silver like this one has. The little midget on top is a Zenith Z-180 series laptop from 1987 that clocks in at 12lbs. It's fully functional aside from the hard drive, but the beauty of these old computer systems is hard drives (and even batteries) are optional. You can actually see the battery for the Z-180 series near the far right corner of the table. The battery connected to the computer using the exact same barrel connector as the power cable and also had the same receptacle for charging, meaning when the battery wasn't in use you would just plug the cable directly into the power supply. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Endless/Nameless Posted April 6, 2016 Author Share Posted April 6, 2016 4 hours ago, Victor-933 said: Those are awesome!! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LazerMaster5 Posted April 6, 2016 Share Posted April 6, 2016 16 hours ago, 6tails said: You'd be surprised - try it in 32-bit Windows 7. The latest version of Windows supported by it is XP. Even if you install the software in compatibility mode, it doesn't recognize the camera. And why would I want to downgrade my OS to 32 bit? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
willow Posted April 6, 2016 Share Posted April 6, 2016 the computer I bought a few years ago was a pretty dumb purchase. originally I bought it because I thought the motherboard on my laptop was fried but I also wanted a desktop for other reasons. it's a dumb purchase because my laptop wasn't actually fried and the desktop's on board graphics card (or at least that seems to be the most likely culprit) crapped out to a point where I can't even run my computer. so basically I spent more money than I needed to on something that didn't last very long.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Feelwell Posted April 6, 2016 Share Posted April 6, 2016 Kobo Vox Ereader. Most scummy thing ever sold. Deleted any books you had open if you turned it off. So you had to remove all bookmarks and stuff from a book each time before you turned it off, or else it deletes it. Gallery is balls, glitchy and broken. System prone to crashing. Instead of fixing these with patches, offered tiny little discount on their next product. No refunds either. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spot Posted April 6, 2016 Share Posted April 6, 2016 That would be my HP Compaq pavilion DV9700. I bought that son of a bitch for $1,500 and it crapped out within the year. Never going HP again. Next regrettable purchase will probably be buying my next cell phone. I don't actually need one but I like to be "up with the times". Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LazerMaster5 Posted April 6, 2016 Share Posted April 6, 2016 1 hour ago, 6tails said: Some hardware simply refuses to work in a 64-bit environment. There's plenty of new hardware being made this very day that will not run in a 64-bit OS at all. I have two mice, a couple of webcams, and even a couple of gamepads (that don't use drivers, are supposedly HID standards-compliant) that simply don't work on 64-bit Anything, even Linux. Yeah, but if I downgraded my OS, all my games would run like shit. Besides, the webcam was only $3. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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