$150 FS cheapie: HP Tower PC - Dual Core AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 1GB, 80GB, DVD/CD±RW, XP, mouse/keyboard

JoeRocket said:   If this is better than your office tower it's time to upgrade your hardware. This CPU is what 8 or 10 years old?

It's an OFFICE tower, and this is a money saving site. Who here spends money to upgrade a tower that doesn't need it. This PC would handle anything you can do in an office environment. Plus, it has XP pro, 1GB and DVI. Just fine for the price.

JoeRocket said:   If this is better than your office tower it's time to upgrade your hardware. This CPU is what 8 or 10 years old?
Yeah because you should be able to play Crysis 2 on your office PC right?

Thanks OP. Almost worth getting one to have around if one of my office machine craps out.

Worth mentioning---these are described as "off lease" (guessing that means used, possibly refurb'ed) and have only a 30-day warranty.

poisonz said:   Very nice office system with room to upgrade. Even without the upgrade, this is a turn key solution for few ppls who wants to build cheap PC at reasonable price and doesnt want to pay for OS.
They have the slim desktop version with P4- 3.2GHZ with almost same spec for $99 from Buy.com.

link?

poisonz said:   I just double checked and it was half of very thing compare to OP's spec for $50 cheaper, but this comes with media.
http://www.buy.com/prod/hp-d530-p4-3-2ghz-512mb-40gb-cdrw-deskto...they both seem good for the price, but what kind of media?

You Have a Office Tower? How do you rate?

But seriously...

Anyone have this?

Can CPU be upgraded?

poisonz said:   Very nice office system with room to upgrade. Even without the upgrade, this is a turn key solution for few ppls who wants to build cheap PC at reasonable price and doesnt want to pay for OS.
They have the slim desktop version with P4- 3.2GHZ with almost same spec for $99 from Buy.com.

An athlon 64 X2 will demolish a pentium 4, even with the difference in clock speed. We're not talking big numbers here- a modern sempron will eat them both for breakfast. but in terms of raw processing power, expect the athlon 64 to be twice as fast in computational tasks.

retiredlawman said:   Would be nice to mention in your header that these are used off-line lease computers.

They say refurb but does a store not far from me. If a lease computer fires up, they wipe coffee stains, finger
prints off and use an old standard called "Carnu" to make it sell better. He see's nothing wrong in his ethics
but complaints about his products abound.

If price is the issue scrounge up a bit more and buy one of the low end Lenovos or a closeout on Lenovo laptops
which happens frequently.

Think of refurb electronics and reliable as $250 car at a Maasive Clearence sale. When I was working on a Masters
the university credit union arranged for a few hundred cars to be brought in for such a sale. I was there early
and spotted a three year old Volvo at a heart stopping low price and was sitting in it before anyone else. I
took it for a test drive and front bumper fell off.....headed to dealership and just as I pulled in the whole
grill assembly fell off. Then it made a clunk and died. Service Manage laughed , as did many others, crawled
under the car and said "this 242DL has been in a very bad front ender. I told him it was from a sale. He said
take it right back. Well it wouldn't start. A mechanic looked at engine and said it was not the proper one
and he would bet money I had a broken crankshaft. I called a tow truck to take it back to the super sale.

The air got pretty blue. The Supervisor of the auction told an employeed the car was marked not to be sold.
Fired him on the spot. I walked away with the tow bill paid and $200 cash in my pocket and never went to a
similar sale.

I see more and more refurb stuff on reputable on line store ads and it really rattles my cage.

No red for poster, probably simple mistake.

No but red for you since I can't understand what your saying or how it has anything to do with this deal. With refurb's it all comes down to risk vs. cost. If you have a need for this bare bone units and since it's only a $150 gamble (compared to thousands if your comparing it to used cars)..this computer might be worth it the risk..

Green for OP

thanks....gonna use this as a POS server for a client. This is easier than building one myself. Price is right, too.

dpuopolo said:   I found a similar HP machine to this at the curb. It works quite well.

you found a dual core with xp pro thrown away? wow, lucky dog! This is a nice machine, plenty of slots/expansion ability compared to so many low-end, cheap small form factor units.

GeorgeT said:   MasterRebater said:   retiredlawman said:   The air got pretty blue. The Supervisor of the auction told an employeed the car was marked not to be sold.
Fired him on the spot. I walked away with the tow bill paid and $200 cash in my pocket and never went to a
similar sale.


Huh?

Think Grandpa Simpson.

One trick is to tell stories that don't go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for m'shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt. Which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Gimme five bees for a quarter, you'd say. Now where was I... oh yeah. The important thing was that I had an onion tied to my belt, which was the style at the time. You couldn't get white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...

It was an HP PCM-7000 with XP Media Edition. It even came with its 15 inch LCD, Keyboard and mouse, wireless remote control and CD for Office 2003. It has built in G wireless (the antenna was never even unpacked). The CPU heatsink was full of crud-which was keeping the computer from staying on. I had also thought that the 250 gB hard drive was bad-but all that was wrong was corruption-and there's a recovery partition right on the drive that I ran to get everything up and running again. I'm typing this on the PC in fact..

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Home.jsp?lang=e...

bd said:   How does that HP compare to this off-lease Dell, which Dell Outlet sells regularly on eBay? Those are typically going for about $135 shipped.
That's an auction, who knows how much the final price will end up.

Can anyone tell me how many watts this uses? I'm wondering how much it would cost in electricity to leave it on 24/7...

Crazy, I tried to sell my X2 4000+ desktop a few weeks ago with a 1TB HDD and 4GB RAM on craigslist for $150 and got no bites at all.

That said, if you're like me and still partial to XP I'm sure this will run it perfectly fine.

What does Lensmart have to do with GearXs?
(In quick summary)

no media with this..does it at least create a set of re-install disks? Or can we get them cheap from HP? or can we get a plain xp pro install media somewhere cheap? I have xp non-pro disks already, but I want to make sure I can re-install xp on this baby...

overclock said:   My kids' P4 1.6GHz barely runs Webkinz. Flash games require so much CPU nowadays. So I got them an i5-2300 quad core. I should be set for quite some time now. But this system should be good for a couple more years.

Aren't modern versions of Flash hardware accelerated? Why not add any ~$25 DX9.0 or better graphics card to that available PCI express slot...that is, if Flash games are a necessity (I haven't had opportunity to evaluate hardware acceleration for flash games on an older platform...I don't play games on my media pc, my server, or my laptop). For web surfing/word/excel etc, tho, this is more than enough horsepower. Until very recently, I was running something similar to this as a media PC, with a very cheap upgrade to the graphics card. For $150, you could basically part the thing out and get your money back if you're not happy with it.