Bought an old warhorse of a machine for too cheap.

[simple_gifts]

So the company I work for has an employee discount from a computer recycler and once in a while I check the site to see what they are dumping. Machines are generally priced according to their age. $40-$170 generally, 120 day warranty.

Check a few weeks ago and there is a HP xw8200 dual Xeon workstation; first generation 64-bit Xeons 3.4GHz, hyperthreaded and with a 5 bay tower, 800W PS, dual channel U320 with RAID 1,0,10 and 8Gb ECC RAM; NVIDIA graphics 128Mb, comes with only a 80Gb SATA drive. Seems to be priced at $15.73 A let a few days pass figuring there is a site error or something, then since it does not appear to move, i order it and it ships. Came earlier this week and I put Ubuntu 11.04 64bit on it and it seems to work quite well. Going to be looking around for some used U320 drives to load it up.

Mention this deal to a coworker and he orders a similar priced Dell with 6Gb RAM and he gets an e-mail saying they reviewed the site and the prices were incorrect and he would have to pay over $150 if he wanted the machine. They never contacted me regarding this error; since I have ordered (5) machines in the past perhaps they just let it go...

These HPs are nice machines. Pretty quiet and nicely packaged. This thing weighs around 55 lbs; I'm thinking of putting a table cloth on it and using it as a dinner table...

 

[scurvy]

Originally Posted By: simple_gifts
Check a few weeks ago and there is a HP xw8200 dual Xeon workstation; first generation 64-bit Xeons 3.4GHz, hyperthreaded and with a 5 bay tower, 800W PS, dual channel U320 with RAID 1,0,10 and 8Gb ECC RAM; NVIDIA graphics 128Mb, comes with only a 80Gb SATA drive.
...
These HPs are nice machines. Pretty quiet and nicely packaged. This thing weighs around 55 lbs; I'm thinking of putting a table cloth on it and using it as a dinner table...


That's a very loud, very hot dinner table! Nice find, a steal at that price.

 

[55Test]

A machine like that has lots of useful life left. Maybe you could use it as a media server or something

 

[greenaccord02]

Get you some 15Ks and let 'er rip!

 

[Rick in PA]

WOW, you got a deal.

I picked-up an HP XW4300 a little over a year ago for about $150 and I was tickled pink. Then, I talked a buddy at work into buying one, and he dubbed it "The Iron Duke". Yeah, the HP workstations are sweet.

 

[ToyotaNSaturn]

unbelievable deal. can't buy a table that cheap anywhere nowadays....

 

[Colt45ws]

Hah! I paid almost the exact same for the Dell Poweredge server I bought off a friend who works at a recycler in Seattle. Its not as nice as that one though.
Though, by now I think I've spent over $100 upgrading it.

 

[Cutehumor]

where do you find out who the computer recyclers are? I have no idea what my company does with computers.

 

[Rick in PA]

Originally Posted By: Cutehumor
where do you find out who the computer recyclers are? I have no idea what my company does with computers.


I got mine through ebay. The vendor had a good rating and had a bunch of the same model for sale. I suspect it was from Xerox as there was an odd "Xerox" folder on the drive. It came with a clean install of XP but no recovery disks (and none available from vendor). Must have been legit as I haven't had any problems updating it through Microsoft.