Onio Café

Club Members Page!

Guidelines for Submission:

1.) Device's estimated value should be around $100 or less.
2.) Device should be something you enjoy using and you use it often.
3.) Bonus points for customization, mods, and upgrades.

(#1)

/home/user/ - Website: Libre.town

About: "This is my Fujitsu Lifebook E6550, a 2001 laptop I got for €20 off off Ebay. I put a contemporary system on it: Red Hat Linux 7.1. It can actually run plenty of games, like SimCity. I can use it for text editing and browsing the web, too, of course. It has a floppy drive, a DVD drive and even a little first generation USB port."

(#2)
Gans - Website: MelonForums Profile

About: "As one of these vultures, that loves to crawl around scrapyards and fish out working technology, I'd win this if it would be a competition.

Flatscreen monitors in the old 4:3 format you get for free here. If the border around the screen is thicker than a thumb, the monitor is worthless. Sad, because the screen quality of the old monitors is perfectly fine to work with them, if you can deal with low resolutions.

For a friend I bought a 6 year old desktop for 50 Euros (so it's less than 50 dollars). Bulky desktop, but very powerful machine. Desktops have fallen out of favour for the portable laptops, so you can get Desktops very cheaply.

Scrap can be found all over the board here at my place. It's a very long time ago that I spend any money on a computer. The scrap has a high enough quality here. That silver one is a 2006 dual-core machine with WinXP/Salix from my last workplace. You could get a Windows XP machine for less than 20 Euros, if you have to look on the used market.

My favourite machines have risen in market value, but I got them for free a couple of years ago. but a P3 Win98 machine costs more than 50 dollars now. The Eizo bomb (the huge CRT monitor) too. Geez, was it heavy to carry home... my thin arms were shaking for three days! But it was worth the pain. It has an unbeatable image, but it will probably blow up in a cloud of smoke one day.

I love this about computers, that with extremly little money, lots can be achieved. But this requires to gain some knowledge and the right links on the web that help you... "

(#3)
Brisray - Website: Brisray.com

About: "I like cheap computers, even better if they're free.

People give me their old, ancient ones and I refurbish them and give them to whoever wants one. It usually takes three old ones to make something that might last someone a couple of years.

This might have been the best buy I ever made. It's my original "Server in the Cellar" from 2003. It was a MMX 200MHz machine with 30Gb drive running Windows 2000 Pro and it cost me a whole $25 when a local college were selling off some old computers."

(#4)
worldwidewar - Website: MelonForums Profile

About: "My favorite is the Intel Inspiron E1408, which runs horribly, gets really hot, and almost always needs to be plugged in, but at least looks cool and can run Debian with the same dotfiles as my daily driver. I got it for free when I was helping my sister move houses, since she told me she was just going to throw it away if I didn't want it."

(#5)
GeckoF - Website: GeckoF's Homepage

About: "I was given an Acer Aspire 4315 laptop, with an Intel Celeron 530 CPU and 512MB of RAM. It came with Windows XP SP2 installed along with a bunch of programs and personal files from the previous owner of this laptop which I didn't give care for, apparently he has stopped using it in mid 2014 according to the latest modified files in the system."

"I chose antiX Linux as a distribution as it is very good for low resource systems like this one. I was having some problems using the last available version of antiX (22) such as Wi-Fi disconnections when downloading or similar, so I had to downgrade to version 19.5 which is working quite well."

"[T]he battery drains pretty fast, it gets to last on for like 30 minutes or so and I have to be using it with a charger. And also the headphone and microphone ports don't work and I have to use one with USB instead. I currently use it for Gopher browsing with Lynx, SSH/SFTP, listening to music and playing simple and old games like Doom or ClassiCube."