Hey, y’all! My Dad wants to buy an old PC that I have. Normally, I would just give it to him, but he insists on paying. I tried giving him a price of a dollar, but he insists on a fair price. He does his homework and will grossly overcompensate if I undercharge him. Yes, he is fairly eccentric, but I am but a poor student who blows all his cash on PC junk. So he is always wanting to find ways to give me money without insulting me. I know, wah.
Anyway, this is a 486 DX4 100MHz. 8 Megs and 850 meg on the hard drive. A real dinosaur. Color cannon printer included. What do you think? $150? That’s what I’m thinking. Any help?
“And on the eighth day, God Created beer
to prevent the Irish from taking over
the Earth.” ~SNOOGANS~
There’s a local small-time computer store/repair shop that sells working 486 machinery like this for $50. Fully functional 386’s and 286’s (well, not damaged, anyway) for $35-$25. If you want a machine that needs ten minutes to load Windows 3.1, it won’t cost you much. I have read somewhere that PC’s lose 75% of their value per year.
A few years back I threw a completely working IBM PCjr & monitor (made 1984? maybe?) in the trash because it didn’t have enough memory to run much of anything current (256K, full capacity). It had a 5.25 floppy, but it did not support a hard drive. It did have BASIC on a cartridge (2 cartridge drives), but the monitor and keyboard had different plugs than what is standard now. I needed the closet space for something else, and you really couldn’t use anything “new” with it, software or otherwise. - MC
I recently gave away a 486-33 w/ 250MB hard drive & 4 MB RAM. It seemed like a waste of effort to place an ad for it at all. 'Course, I bought it 7 years ago for $1500. Man, these computers depreciate fast!
I looked in the mirror today/My eyes just didn’t seem so bright
I’ve lost a few more hairs/I think I’m going bald - Rush
I work for several thrift shops in Calif. $75.00 for one of those is what we get. Just sold one yesterday. Also, most aren’t Y2K ready so check that out.
Yeah, it works just fine. I have updated 95 with all the stuff from ms.com. I have tweeked it using sysedit so that it only runs explorer and systray at startup so there isn’t a bunch of stuff eating up resources. The thing works great if you only word process (no spreadsheets) and get on the net.
Anything beyond that, and it is a 486-SUX. So, since the monitor is going out, I think I will pick up a cheap new monitor for the big guy and charge him $150. It will be the same as giving it to him for free, and he’ll never be the wiser. Thanks for all the info!
“And on the eighth day, God Created beer
to prevent the Irish from taking over
the Earth.” ~SNOOGANS~
That sounds reasonable. $125-170 for something that will run a modern OS like W95, that’s about what you’d pay to buy it used as a consumer (not as a geek who can mix-n-match and do repairs). Those old computers still continue to serve people long after they would fail to serve demanding folk like us. I just handed off to my folks a computer that had fallen off the bottom end of my personal “food chain” – a 6100 with a G3 upgrade card, maxed out on RAM at 72, video incapable of being upgraded beyond 16 bits at 640x480. They in turn are sending their ancient IIci to an auntling of my grandparents’ generation for use as a word processor and email send /receive station. In PC terms that’s a 386 at 33 MHz with 5 MB RAM. So a 486/100 should still have some use to it for anyone not in need of 3D rendering or Naturally Speaking voice dictation or visiting web sites with zillions of processor-intensive plug-ins.
It sounds like a quite viable litte machine. I bought (as a “back up PC”) a 486/66 w/ a 160 meg hard drive and 16 megs of RAM for $100 a few months ago (it included a modem, though.) So this PC, with it’s not-so-bad 850 mb. hard drive and 100 MHz processor, sounds decent in comparison! If your dad got another 8 megs of RAM for it, it could do him well for a while for the most basic things. And the fact that it has Win95 is also excellent.
