Bluetrait

We all know about them, a great way for a cheap techie like myself to pickup some free stuff! It seems to run in my family.

On Monday father told that council clean up was on and that I should be on the look out for stuff. Anyway later that day he found a few computers lying on the side of the road. With screw driver in hand I went to check it out. Pity the fastest thing there was a Pentium MMX (I’ve since out grown these, Pentium 2s or higher :p)

Just as I was leaving to Matthew’s house (where I have been for the last 2 days) I saw a dell tower sitting on the opposite side of the road. So I quickly picked it up and went back home. At first I thought it may have been an older Pentium 2 but on closer inspection it had a Pentium III sticker on it so I was very excited.

I quickly pulled off the case (no screw driver needed) and found a pretty empty computer. No hard drive, no cdrom and the sound card was gone. But it did have the CPU, mobo, ram and video card. So I checked out the CPU and it was in fact a Pentium 3 700MHz. Funky! I didn’t have time to check out the rest as I was already late.

Anyway I remembered that the video card had a fan on it so I thought it may have been a 32mb TNT2 Ultra which would be nice, but it wasn’t. I did a google search for the system at Matthew’s place but I didn’t remember the model number. (Dell Dimension XPS T700r)

Anyway got back home and booted the system up. 640mb Ram!!! W00t. I wasn’t expecting that. I have since then done a search and it seems that the video card is a Geforce 256 32mb AGP (I think it is a non DDR version, unsure). Hell yeah! Nice.

So I scored myself a Pentium 3 with 640mb Ram and a Geforce 1. This should replace my Celeron 400 in my bed room.

Last week Josh decided to skip school and drop off a Voodoo5 into my place. It was running nicely in my brothers computer for a bit (until I got jealous), upgrading his Voodoo4. But he doesn’t use that many 3d games and his CPU was limiting the games not the video card (Duron 800) so I’ve since reclaimed it and am going to put it to use elsewhere. Reminds me, I need to follow josh up on the Voodoo 5.

Anyway the Lan party was good. I got a *ahem* *cough* copy of Counter Strike Source off Matthew. It is based off the Half-life 2 engine or something. But we were lucky as it even ran well on Alec’s Geforce 2 MX. One thing I must say though:

THE GAME PLAY IS EXACTLY THE GAME!!! I don’t know why they bothered. I mean, cool there is a new physics engine but WTF!? Why bother. They like to drag games out as long as possible. There is no point in buying the game. The old CS is the same thing.

Anyway I’m off to play with my new computer :)

EDIT: Matthew has posted a blog about the lan but for some reason his web site just stopped working for me. When it is up it can be found here: http://www.ucosty.net/ (with photos). I will edit in the permalink later.

EDIT: permalink http://www.ucosty.net/2004/11/09/lanning/