Finding lots of old tech
By Owen Daigle written on May 08, 2025 in Random
Recently I found out that there was a spring cleanup day in the town I am in. Lots of people put old items such as technology at their curb for the city to come and dispose of it. I am greedy so I got in my van and drove around town and filled up the whole van with computer parts. Then the next morning, I went out again (after having emptied the van) and found more.
I found a lot of good things including:
- Dell USB C dock WD19 (300$ dock!!) in perfect condition
- ASUS pro art pa246q (500USD monitor from 2011!!) in decent condition. Sometimes it refuses to turn on but after unplougging and replugging in, good. Great colours on the display
- 3 other monitors
- 3 computers (one of which is very old), all 3 work
- 2 laptops, afaik none work…
- a phone (samsung galaxy a71). seems to have a broken battery/charge controller, I am too cheap to buy one of those to test
- 2 tablets, one is icloud locked… one is FRP locked (may be able to bypass later)
- nintendo switch (broken, have yet to take apart)
- 2 printers (one is hp laser printer, works perfectly. Ordered new third party toner and good as new), (one is broken hp inkjet)
- Old 90s keyboard in MINT condition. It is bright white, not yellowed with age!!
- webcam which works fine
- lots of cables and other random junk.
Do I actually use these things???
All in all, it was a fun trip. I use two of the monitors as my main monitors here. One of them (the asus pro art) is very nice except for that sometimes it just refuses to turn on. I still am trying to troubleshoot that, but once it turns on, it works fine. The other one (a samsung one 1080p one) also works fine. I also use the dell dock which works very well. I needed a power supply for it, but I had one lying around.
One of the computer cases is a good early 2000s case for my windows xp build. That computer now has all of the parts except for the psu. I made a silly and did not realise that the psu I was planning to use did not have enough pcie connections for my monster 9800 gtx card.
The printer is also nice since I have temporarily moved away from home, and my parents still use my printer at home so I left it there. This new printer lets me keep that one at home, and have this one away.