[bitwize]

Instead of buying a brand-new potato, consider buying a used or refurb'd laptop. Your performance stance doing this is much better now compared to.... any time else in PC history because PC hardware performance gains have flattened out. Plus, corporations get rid of perfectly good PCs like, every year because they want the latest model for their staff and especially their executives/management. Know where to shop and you'll find a glut of cheap and even free computers. I've been poor myself; used machines is how I got by. That and building my own.

Either way, you'll pay about as much for a used ThinkPad in good condition with good specs as you would for a new HP Stream or other cheaptop.

[tombert]

> Plus, corporations get rid of perfectly good PCs like, every year because they want the latest model for their staff and especially their executives/management.

Tangential, but a bit of a lifehack I figured out awhile ago is that corporations dump off old servers on eBay for basically nothing, and most servers allow you to install a regular desktop graphics card in there. Servers usually have a lot of CPUs and a lot of RAM, so 9 years ago when a broke me needed enough power to do cool stuff on the computer, I would go buy a used server on eBay, and it was good enough for video processing and editing and gaming and distributed computing experiments...as long as I remembered to turn it off when I wasn't using it. Whenever I would accidentally leave it on for a few days, I would end up increasing my power bill by ~$40, a lot of money when you don't have much.

Still, it's a trick I still use occasionally, even now that I make decent money. I semi-recently bought a 48 core, 128gb RAM server for around $400, which I use for any big computing experiments. Could I just spin up an AWS box with these specs? Probably, but I think there is value in being able to have the hardware locally.

[bitwize]

I once scavenged an HP workstation from behind a dumpster. It was just sitting there in the rain. I brought it in, dried it off, and checked the innards for rust or damage. All looked nearly brand new, so I let it dry out for a couple of days, and powered it on -- it worked. Put a hard disk in and it was ready to go. It's a fairly powerful machine, with four cores and 12 GiB of RAM, a real powerhouse for 2012 when it was new. Probably chewed through many a spreadsheet back in the day. Now I'm making it into a build server.

[tombert]

That's awesome. I think my wife would punch me if I got into the habit of dumpster diving, but there have been multiple times where I've seen what looks like awesome equipment (monitors, computers, surge protectors, etc.) being thrown away near universities and office buildings, and I always have to resist my hoarding nature to take them.

Four cores and 12gb of RAM would make a pretty solid build server, with enough room left for a Minecraft and video streaming server to boot! Sounds like a pretty awesome find.