This probably only pertains to folks in the US.

Anyone else out there on the Freecycle lists? For those who don't know what it is, it is an email network (Yahoo) where folks can offer stuff or request stuff -- the only catch is that it has to be FREE. It is pretty much concentrated only to your own particular town, or in my case, county.

Scored my second free laptop computer today via Freecycle. All I did was ask.

The first one was an Averatec 3150 with a busted display. Seems the owner busted the screen while deployed in Iraq and had left it with his mother to dispose of. Yielded some good parts (DVD-CDRW, 40 gig hard drive, 512 mb RAM card). I can probably sell the motherboard on eBay for about $100 later. Even the case is worth some eBay money.

Today an HP Pavilion 485 dropped into my lap. The owner said it booted up then shut down. When I booted up I noticed an install menu for PC-BSD, and sure enough there was an install CD in the DVD-CDRW. My guess is that PC-BSD didn't play well with the AMD Athlon 4 processor, but that is only a guess. Guess the husband must have blown away the Windows 2000 and broke it (for him) during a BSD install.

So ... PCLOS 2007 has been loaded onto it and I am already an hour into distro update w/out a hint of problems.

This will be the wife's computer. I bought a Dell D400 on eBay Saturday night.

Don

Yea, I'm on the Freecycle list around my area. Haven't gotten any laptops yet though, I am gonna have to work on that!

I am the moderator (singular) on our list, and my observation has been"ask and ye shall receive."

D.

dieselbenz wrote: PCLOS 2007 has been loaded onto it and I am already an hour into distro update w/out a hint of problems.

Don

I noticed you like PCLOS. I used to use it with Mepis in the past. I tried PCLOS 2008 also very good systems.

I want to let you know that you should look into the new 2008 Mandriva system it is similar system like PCLOS but I see great future on it. Being a KDE user I must admit and I predict that Mandriva will be moving real fast to the first liking within the other OS. I was a lot more impress with it than with any PCLOS combination. This is only my own experience with respect to all great OS systems, but I want to let you know because you also use KDE OS and PCLOS. Give it a try if you wish or can than let me know if you wish.

Best Regards,