Very recently my father came home with some new (used) computers, asking him where he got them, he replied that they were outside of the local middle school. They were fairly decent computers, both HP d220m’s, I asked him why they no longer wanted them, and he said that they were supposedly broken, and so the super intendant at the school no longer wanted them, and said we could take them, so my father thought maybe I could fix them.
It turns out that they simply needed new RAM, so knowing this, I asked if there were any more, and he said that yes, there were some more at the school and he could take me to look at them to see if any were worth bringing home and working on. Most of these computers were old P3s and P2s that had been out there for some amount of time, but there was 3 newer Dells, and 1 HP(I use the term newer loosely, they are maybe 3-4 years old, but pretty decent).
So we loaded the 3 Dells, and 1 other HP, and took them back home, after opening them, and inserting RAM I found that 1 of the Dells would not boot at all, I tried switching power supplies, RAM, and Hard Drives to no avail, so I thought the motherboard must be fried from having been in the weather.
I tried the other Dell of the same model, and this one promptly booted and brought me to the login screen, success I thought, at the very least we have 1 useful computer to do something with.
I did the same with the HP and it had the same result.
3 down 1 to go. Now this last PC was the best of them all, it was a Dell Dimension 8300, which has a P4 2.6GHz CPU, so I really hoped this one would boot, and it did. So knowing this, and having my choice of any of the four, I picked this one as it had the best CPU, Hard drive, and Cooling, and took the RAM from the others, and placed it in this one.
The computer I was replacing was a custom built AMD Athlon XP 1800+, which only had 256mb of RAM, and an 80GB hard drive (running Debian Etch), so moving to a P4, 1GB of RAM, and a 120GB hard drive was quite a step up.
At first I thought I would try to simply put my 80GB hard drive in the new computer to save me having to reinstall and reconfigure everything, but due to the different model CPUs, it gave me an error immediately at GRUB. So I had to install Debian on the new machine and reconfigure it, but it wasn’t as bad as expected because I had a 1GB flash drive to move the files, and once I got samba working, I just moved them over the network.
Overall I am very pleased with this new computer, it puts the old one to shame, and Linux is amazingly fast on this hardware.
I’ve even got Compiz-Fusion running on the new machine, with some nice new effects. 
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