The castaways

HP Pavilion a705w

It's amazing what people throw away. A few weeks ago a friend of mine spots a PC tower outside to go to the trash. Being a computer guy he picks it up. He thought it look fairly new and worth checking out. He asked me if I was interested and I said sure. So I check it out and it's a HP Pavilion a705w in a little rough shape but not too bad. At first it didn't work but I soon breathed new life into it. Everything was there hard drive,dvd drive,CPU and so on. After I got it running of course I cleaned it out of the previous owners stuff. Yes they had left it with stuff on there. Very careless of them. Of course it was loaded with virus's and spyware and some really horrible pictures of early teen girls wanting to be tough rappers. Kind of sad but anyway. Not a bad machine with a 2.93Ghz Intel Celeron, 256mb RAM, 40Gb drive,DVD/Cd combo and Windows XP Home. Maybe be not a blazing machine but actually better than what I had.

eMachine 15" e15Tr LCD monitor

The second part of the story is that yesterday coming home from work I drive by a house and see a LCD monitor sitting against a fence. I turn around and pick it up. I thought what the heck if it doesn't work I lose nothing. It's 15 " eMachines LCD e15Tr monitor. It was missing the power cord so I substituted my wife's laptop plug and it worked. It's got some lite scratch's on the housing but the screen looks in good condition(that's what counts anyway). So now I've got an almost complete computer setup for zero dollars. Like I said it's amazing what people throw away.

I do plan on upgrading the HP with more RAM(up to 2Gb), video card and larger drive in the future. Now I just got to reconfigure my work area to accommodate it. It made my weekend.

References: HP Pavilion a705w
eMachine 15" Monitor e15T (Specs, Manual)