Even on somewhat old hardware, a firewall running without the monitor or hard drive and using roughly 20% of the power supply capacity does not waste a lot of power. If one can afford a PIE2 or PIE3 with the support hardware and case you can make a VERY frugal firewall, cheap. Cheap does not beat FREE using available retired hardware. Just make sure you get very conservative on how it uses power and devices to reduce impact on your power bill. (or run it off of your solar/wind power system)

Russia ancient computer image:
http://media.englishrussia.com/newpi...fcb86_orig.jpg

Classic Mac OS and dozens of apps can now be run in a browser window https://arstechnica.com/apple/2017/0...rowser-window/

How much power does your old PC use, very nice link that explains it all clearly:
http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.html

Found a HD recorder in the dumpster, I mistakenly dentified these are DVD players and not useful. But yesterday I decided to get one, saw a HD inside it, opened it and in 10 mts. had a 1000 Tb SeaGate HD out. The bottom was dirty so cleaned it as best as possible and blew any dust away. Hopefully, it is quite clean now and will work. Will try this on much later. Now I must have been more careful in the past and regret missing 4 or so opportunities where I passed by such HD recorders but let them go to trash.

Also, found a Samsung Monitor, it is has TV, speakers and audio input. Tested it and it works, will have to try it TV, speakers etc., on it later. Have no cables for it.

If an item is found in trash that seems new, it helps to learn about it. I missed out on a few DVRs thinking they are just DVD players:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_recorder

Now I feel, I might also have missed out on a few special radios with some sort of flash
memory on even HD inside them. Next time will bring the item home and take a chance.
Have made same error several times before. However, when I get a lot of items sometimes,
it is hard to carry it all.

The monitor I found is a Samsung Syncmaster 710P:
https://www.cnet.com/products/samsun...-series/specs/

The TV tuner is just analog. This monitor taught me a great lesson. It helps to figure out
why a particular product was discarded in the dumpster. This monitor is from 2005 or so, it had no remote, so the remote likely stopped working, the display quality is ok from reviews the TV pic quality is poor, the TV tuner is old fashioned analog and the speakers are cheap quality. So, it has served its life well and very likely the owner discarded it conveniently after getting a more recent smart TV at good price.

It is ok to use this for video, audio or PC monitor but that is about it.

The link below lists all different kinds of hardware that is present today. It is a very interesting list and good to reflect upon. Gone are the days when one expects to find a 286 in the dumpster. Every 3 years or so, many upgrade, specially as prices are getting lower. So, expect to find hardware as listed below in 3 to 5 years discarded:

http://www.lakka.tv/get/linux/

Cheap does beat free these days. Unless someone else pays your electric bill. A pi for a firewall could save more than the value of the pi per year in billable electrons. And for certain things like zero-ing out drives, preferred compared to what most consider a modern PC. The smaller low power things can also help free up resources on your daily driver. To stream the webcam you have pointed out the window, so you just launch VLC to see what's behind the closed curtain. Or as a sound server so your daily driver isn't doing a pulse over jackd configuration with a 30 band EQ, in addition to everything else it might do. The pi under load at 10W versus your gaming rig under load at 1200W.

As much as I like older hardware for it's historic and educational aspects. When you're trying to get things done, the newer stuff is cheap enough and low power enough that the old stuff is mostly a waste of time and effort. You keep one or two around for rare-ish interfaces, ISA, PCI, Parallel Port, Firewire, IDE/PATA, Serial, and whatever else you haven't gotten a USB dongle for yet. It's just hard to beat a quad core with 16GB ram that draws less than 10W's under load at < $500. Especially if you live in a warm climate and have 1970s era wiring in your dwelling with air conditioning making up most of your technology based expenses.

^ true but it still pays to keep one's eyes open both for freebies or used stuff. doesn't have to be a whole computer, either (i certainly wouldn't drag a 286 home from the dumpster, except for antiquaric reasons maybe).

This site has great info. about older PCs and power use:
http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.html

Going into sleep mode, turning it off when not in use etc., saves a lot of power.

I found an IBM Thinkpad G40 this morning outside someone's front gate and took it home out of curiosity. It's a huge, clunky machine and you have to slide a latch to open it. Inside there's a proper full-size keyboard. It has a built-in CD drive (I've never seen one of those on a laptop before) and a drive with a flapping door, which I think is for floppies. Yep, real legacy stuff! There's even a parallel port at the back for an old-fashioned printer and a PS2 mouse port. For networking, there's an ethernet port and also a phone jack; this machine actually has an internal modem.

There are three large buttons below the keyboard which look like they were intended to be mouse buttons. I think the mouse itself must be the red rubber stud sticking out of the keyboard, which makes slight lateral movements when you press it.

Of course the battery is completely flat, but I think I have found a power socket at the back; it's round with four prongs sticking out of it, quite different from the one on my Samsung.

I looked the model up online. Apparently it has a Celeron P4 with only 250MB of RAM when new, though it can be upped to 1GB. The hard drive is small too, about 30GB. It's a real oddity.

Nice find, it is not too old, I still have my P2 desktop with 3G HD and ram is 124 Mb or so.

It's no use to me. I'm not spending £25 on a charger only to find perhaps that the previous owner has taken out the hard drive for security. Besides, I doubt if chargers for these old IBM models are still sold. I'll take it down to the dump and they can recycle it.

Sounds a bit like my first laptop - 500MHz (I think) processor, 128MB ram, floppy, cdrom, modem, PC card slot, parallel printer port, serial socket, & a 14" screen - real classy piece of kit.