Wait.. what?

Twiggy

Last week, I posted about how I got an IBM Thinkpad 380XD with origional adaptor and a nice laptop bag, in full working order for $70 Canadian.

I am now on ebay looking for a laptop from the win 3.x era with a colour display to replace the Toshiba t2100 because it is monochrome and seems to have a bad serial port.

I cam across this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-ThinkPad-TY ... Sw9GhYkPPB

Wait, what? LOL. Did I get lucky?

P.S: since when is taking a dell from the early 2000-mid 200's and maxing the ram and stuff, "Retro"? WTF? Personally if it's above a Pentium 3, I have no interest in it.

BigCJ

ThinkPads go for crazy amounts because they were top-tier. Yes, you probably did luck out, nice one.

The thing about Dells, no that isn't retro and never was. I guess it's classified as "retro" because it's more than 3yrs old and not the "latest and greatest" crap. I have an old Inspiron from the mid-2000s running XP on a P4. Outdated? Yes. Retro? No.

Twiggy

BigCJ wrote:

ThinkPads go for crazy amounts because they were top-tier. Yes, you probably did luck out, nice one.

The thing about Dells, no that isn't retro and never was. I guess it's classified as "retro" because it's more than 3yrs old and not the "latest and greatest" crap. I have an old Inspiron from the mid-2000s running XP on a P4. Outdated? Yes. Retro? No.

Feast your eyes on this nonsense then:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/VINTAGE-Windows ... rkt%3D1%26

BigCJ

Christ, there's just no excuse for that kind of nonsense. We had stacks of computers just like that laying around gathering dust in the corner at my old school of tech. They're so common I could have had one free if I wanted and some moron is asking $200? Ridiculous.

Twiggy

BigCJ wrote:

Christ, there's just no excuse for that kind of nonsense. We had stacks of computers just like that laying around gathering dust in the corner at my old school of tech. They're so common I could have had one free if I wanted and some moron is asking $200? Ridiculous.

Yeah, lol. My tech teacher in high school actually gave me one.

BigCJ

That's what I meant too. My county has a special school set aside just for tech classes and students from all four high schools would take the bus or drive to their classes. All I would have had to do was ask the teacher and he would have given me one like a shot.

KCompRoom2000

popeyewinter wrote:

Feast your eyes on this nonsense then:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/VINTAGE-Windows ... rkt%3D1%26

If you thought that was bad, How about this? $495 for a refurbished Pentium III Desktop? No thanks, I'm good since I'd rather just get something like this and put one of my spare hard drives in it and a fresh install of Windows and then you'll have your "Ultimate Top-of-the-line DOS/Win9x gaming PC" for a fraction of that price.

Personally, I wouldn't consider it "retro" unless it had a beige case and a Socket 423 or earlier CPU, Anything after that should be considered "tweener" IMO, I actually bought my Dell DImension 4300S at RE-PC (recycling center in Seattle) for only $35 a few years ago, It had some repair work and minor upgrades done to it but afterwards it's a pretty good Windows 98/2000 gaming and productivity PC, I wonder if they still carry those?

It's a shame there are hardly any good places for decently priced retro hardware, But I guess the reason for the high prices is because sellers think they're "collectables" in the same sense that early DIsney VHS printings and old toys are collectables.

BigCJ

@KCompRoom2000
You're very right about sellers overestimating what they have. Just because it's old does not mean it's extremely valuable. They made thousands of each model and are usually not too hard to stumble upon if you look hard enough. I could understand asking more for something like the ThinkPad OP has, since those were the top of the line back then. They hold their value because of their durability and I'd be more than willing to pay a little extra for that. Aside from that, reasons to ask way up there for a 15yr old computer are few and far between.

EDIT: That second OptiPlex looks pretty nice. I have an old IDE hard disk that would be perfect for it. Hook up a CRT monitor and load Win95C, yes that would work very well.

thinkpadman

popeyewinter wrote:

Feast your eyes on this nonsense then:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/VINTAGE-Windows ... rkt%3D1%26

Well he's sold 12 of those Dell boxes, with only one left. There's obviously demand for it. Not only that but there's 130 people watching it!
The same seller had a 486 DX4 100 for $400. Mind you I ended up spending more than that on my 486 over the last couple of years, but partially due to finding some brand new components.

Still unless it's a 386 or 486 in Australia, I don't see people willing to spend $300 or so on a Pentium 3/4 machine these days. Like popeyewinter, for "vintage" computing I'm not interested after Pentium 3 either, although it's not that vintage to me. I tend to look at Core 2 as the absolute minimum for modern stuff.

If you're looking for another laptop for the Windows 3.x era, I have three suitable laptops that probably be something you might consider if you can find one:
ThinkPad 370c - mine's got a 486 DX4 75, 20 MB RAM, and 1.2GB HDD
ThinkPad 755Cs - also has a 486 DX4 75, 20 MB RAM, but a 540 MB HDD (with these 2 ThinkPads, the first 4 MB of RAM was on the motherboard, with a 16 MB credit card sized expansion card as an upgrade.
ThinkPad 760EL - a Pentium 133, 72 MB RAM, and 2 GB HDD (also allows the keyboard to be placed on an angle)

Twiggy

yes, it appears his customers were people who didn't know nay better.

02k-guy

thinkpadman wrote:

Well he's sold 12 of those Dell boxes, with only one left. There's obviously demand for it. Not only that but there's 130 people watching it!
The same seller had a 486 DX4 100 for $400. Mind you I ended up spending more than that on my 486 over the last couple of years, but partially due to finding some brand new components.

That's a lot of grade A hardware for the money. With that many for sale, it's a sure bet they were pulled from corporate and lived in a fairly clean environment..

Just like with Thinkpads, some people are freaks for Dells of that era.
heck, I enjoyed opening those and even the Gateways of that era. Lots of thinking went into making them. So I can see people pooping 200 bucks for one.
The crap around here being tossed is mostly generic - and should be tossed.

michaelweaser

Well I bought my ibm thinkpad 380xd like almost a year ago, and I paid only like $88 which included shipping, and that model wasn't that price , non of the same models where, they where between like between $70 and $150

Twiggy

There may be a demand for dells like that.

Demand is only one half though, supply is the other. At the moment the supply still greatly exceeds the demand, which means prices should logically be low as fack.