Shipping is a rip off. And I wonder how long that old hard drive will keep spinning. Might be ok for an email, net search machine, but just barely.

Or for your child to play educational games and such on. And if it crashes or fails...you have yourself a disposable computer. Unless you live in CA where you are required to dispose of such item in a proper manner.

I thought the purpose of this site was to post deals, not oddites. Nice find, Ben's young adult deal finders, now how much for a 1984 Commodore 64?

This reminds me of a garage sale we had recently. 60 dollars was not had. =/

Dear Surplus- I am still waiting if you can sell Apple II one day..

Appreciate the snarky comments, but I have a few of these GX models floating around and they have their merits. (I didn't see how much they're ripping for shipping).

First, sturdy plastic case built for Enterprise use, they're compact, sturdy and easy to open and maintain and replace parts. Any hard drive can fail, so those comments are silly - if anything it's a piece of cake to find a replacement and pop it in.

Can't tell if these are GX260s or GX270s or something else, but I have both models running Ubuntu with wireless and they are fast and completely usable machines for basic computing. My teenage kid survives with one and multitasks with IM, Wacomm tablet drawing, web and more. I even built a MythTV box on one, drivers all worked but didn't want to buy the necessary larger hard drives.

You may find them cheaper at Salvation Army or Goodwill or elsewhere, but don't knock recycling computers - they can be a bargain and have years of use left in them. Grandma doesn't need a quad core 1TB machine to send email and surf the quilting sites.

#3, Ben posted a deal for Sega Dreamcast consoles a couple of weeks ago, so keep watching the site. You may very well get your wish!

Not a great deal if you pay your own electricity bill. P4 = spaceheater

Not worth even $60. The 1.7 Ghz P4 is the original P4 design, not much faster than the 1Ghz P3. The 20GB drive very slow by todays standards is basically worthless. You could add a faster drive & a GB or ram, but that would cost more than the computer.

I think Ben needs to pick up a couple of these to replace his servers.

what the heck is a froppy drive?

Floppy drive is a storage device origin from IBM- I guess it is 1st removable storage in the PC history- Luckily Surplus did not use 5 1/4" as standard equipment- even it is way faster than the cassette tape used by Apple II

p4 1.7 uses 63 watts. thats par with today's desktop processors. it never was a fast processor though. this was still when amd was kicking intel's arse.

#6, I agree. The snarky comments are really juvenile.

A couple buddies and I bought a lot of these for resale. They're actually really good, quick machines. The ones we got had the hyper-threaded P4s, just a step down from dual-core. I don't know about these, but wouldn't be surprised if they were hyper-threaded.

These machines are more than enough for just about anyone's real computer needs, and no, hard gaming isn't a "need" in this price range. I'd say it's a steady bargain at $60. Shipping kills the deal.

Low computer power maybe good for certain application- like cashier register(POS),voice system in the company or like for Grand mom since they cannot read/type fast( I think for this kind of user- PIII 866 should good enough for them.However the reminding life of these product is unknown.(Remember PC component does have aging problem.) And Dell use many special parts made upgrade/repair basically impossible( consider cost and also availability). That means in case of failure- you might end of throw it away- not that much parts you can recycle into another system - Consider the extreme high risk factor- this is not call a deal for me. I will prefer get the $49 Sempron CPU M/B combo and get some low end parts- at least I don't need to junk all of them in case of problem.

We are still using two systems with an AMD 1700+ and an AMD 2600+. They are on 16 hours a day, mostly every day, although they are probably only used for 5 to 6 hours each day. Both are running XP and both have had hard drives replaced, memory upgraded, etc. The 1700+ system also had a mother board replaced. We can't seem to kill them.

The 1700+ will play Grand Theft Auto Vice City and of course it surfs the web, runs Word and the Word Perfect Office Suite, etc. Mostly now it is used for downloading music. The 2600+ is my wife's system and is used mostly for web surfing, e-mail, facebook, and the like.

I bought a Gateway with an AMD quad core with 3 GB of memory, a 640 GB hard drive, DVD burner, etc, but have still to get it up and running. For what we do with our systems, it's probably way, way overkill. It has Vista and I'm still waiting for the Windows 7 upgrade to arrive. Maybe then we will get it up and running.

Long winded, rambling post, but it shows that everyone doesn't need the latest and greatest. As #15 points out, I would be careful of the Dell proprietary parts, though.

I've been rehabbing these old Dell machines for years (GX150s, Dimension 4000 series) and have yet to run into proprietary issues. I have read that the PSUs and motherboards are proprietary, but since neither of these have ever failed me on one of these old workhorses, it hasn't been an issue. Honestly, if the PSU or motherboard failed, I'd probably recycle the computer, or, in the case of a PSU, see if I could get a cheap Dell replacement on eBay.

Otherwise, I have resurrected/modernized a number of these machines with RAM, video cards, DVD burners, PCI wireless adapters, USB 2.0 add-on boards, hard drives, etc. with NO issues.

These old boxes are built like tanks, and are easy to work on as noted above.

#13 that's better efficiency than I thought (way better than my p4 back in the day)

but compared to my htpc's 4850e 2.5ghz X2 at 45w, that's 40% more electricity for 34% of the power (considering dual cores).

equalize the ghz and it comes to just under 120% more electricity to do the same amount of work.

This site only has fax#. NO phone. The unit they sent to me was DOA. These are NOT refurbished! Just blew off some dust then ship not even a simple test to verify for functionality.
I sent them a fax & still waiting but don't expect for reply any more...
I'll NEVER buy from a site has no phone.

#19 here is the phone #
http://www.fatbacon.com/forums/technology/118303

Mike Mak
President
Surplus Computers
Surpluscomputers.com
1600 Duane Ave.
Santa Clara, CA 95054
Phone: 408/327-0420 Ext.101
Fax: 408/327-0113