I wish there were some wholesale auctions for PC stuff around here, or some kinda salvage places or something… I really need some new toys to play with. In Australia we had a nice salvage place to get new stuff from where my Dad and I would go a lot.
Then in Sacramento we had the wonderland that is Ali’s Surplus Stuff… his sticker price was always pretty high but he’d usually knock a couple bucks off because I was always buying crap in there. He had all kinds of awesome stuff, from tiny LCD kits to giant refrigerator sized RS232 concentrators.
Then we moved to Indiana, where people seem to think “hey I paid $600 for it two years ago, it’s gotta be worth $300″. Computers don’t work like that man – you plug it in and you can knock a hundred bucks off the value. Half the value for every year you’ve had it. But nope, these hillbillies out here think they have gold.
I’ve been trawling eBay looking for a Catalyst switch, because our old upstairs switch died, so at the moment we’re using one of the old 10BaseT hubs I bought a bunch off of Ali for $3 a piece ages ago. It’s miserable. I can’t copy videos to my PS3 while we’re working, because everything grinds to a halt.
Hopefully sometime in the next month we can afford a little old switch. 