How I got my computer for cheap
Over the summer I work at an event called Trash for Treasure.
At this event people donate the items that they do not want and/or need anymore and donate their items to this school. As you could have guessed the school does take about 20% of the money of sold items but the rest goes to charity. Anyway, I ended working at the school to help organize the electronics department for the sale. Most of the technology that was donated was trash but a computer caught my eye. It was a Gateway DX4831-01e with 6 gigabytes of DDR3 Ram, 1 TeraByte hard drive, a core 13 530 and intel HD GMA graphics card. Here is a picture of the computer below.
The computer even came with a Windows 7 Product Key. So I thought to myself, "Why in the world would someone donate this computer to Trash for Treasure." Well apparently the original owner ended up installing Windows Vista over Windows 7 and threw away the product key so the computer became unusable. I ended up buying this computer for $10 and within four hours of me bring the computer home I got Ubuntu 16.04 live and running on this computer. So all in all, I got a lot of experience with electronics at this charity, I ended up putting forty hours of work their, and got a decent computer for ten dollars. It was some of the most fun I had in volunteer hours. So if you ever see a garage sale nearby its always good to take a look because you never know what you are going to find.
Here is a link to their facebook page if you want to check them out: https://www.facebook.com/OLSTrashAndTreasure/