A crazy amazing thing that happened to me!!

Well the other day I was coming home from working on a job at a local hotel (I'm a custom cabinet maker) and a truly amazing thing happened. I was driving through a residential area when something caught my eye out by the road next to a garbage can. It was a very familiar silver tower computer. I immediately turned around and pulled over, and was amazed to see what looked to be either a PowerMac G5 or a Mac Pro sitting out by the sidewalk waiting to be thrown into the back of a garbage truck. It looked like it was in great shape, so I went up to the door and knocked. A nice lady answered and told me it was her husband's computer, and he had not been able to get it to boot for a long time, so had bought a new one. She said I could have it if I wanted, but her husband had removed the hard drive and she didn't know where the disks or anything were, but as far as she knew everything else was intact. I thanked her very much and loaded the computer into my car.

When I got home I immediately opened it up to look inside. Everything looked fine, all the parts were there except for a hard drive. I also discovered to my amazement that this was indeed an intel Mac Pro. I popped in a spare hard drive I had lying around and powered it up. Of course I got the flashing question mark, but it did power up fine. So I put in my Leopard DVD (I have the family pack, so far only installed on 3 Macs) and went to boot from it. Got the Apple logo but as soon as the wheel started turning it kernel panicked! My first instinct when this happens is to try swapping RAM around, in case there is a bad module. It had 2x1 GB of RAM installed, so I just took one of the modules out. Same problem. I switched it for the other one, and IT BOOTED! I installed Leopard without a hitch and it booted right up into the installation without issues. About this Mac shows that this has 2 x 3 Ghz Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors, which I believe would make it a first generation Mac Pro. It has an ATI Radeon X1900 XT with 512 MB memory.

I have been playing around with this thing now for a couple days and I simply can not believe how lucky I am. It was like winning the lottery. I'm still not sure exactly what I am going to do with it, but this is just so amazing I can't stop looking at it!

For those who don't want to read my long post:

- Found Mac Pro about to be sent to dump.

- Took Mac Pro home.

- Fixed Mac Pro.

- Free Mac Pro!!!

holy cow!

buy a lottery ticket, NOW! before that luck runs dry.

That is soooo cool! Good find... Enjoy it whatever you end up doing with it...

Ignore eric, BUY SEVERAL LOTTERY TICKETS INSTEAD!!!

That is amazing! Am happy for your good luck.

That is too cool.

Good thing for you he wasn't a member of this forum. It would have been fixed in a couple of days.

Congrats! I wish stuff like this would happen to me!

That's just cool. Bet the guy who tossed it would feel stupid if he knew.

TinyEric said:

Ignore eric, BUY SEVERAL LOTTERY TICKETS INSTEAD!!!

Click to expand...

Psh. Buy your STATE lottery authority.

nah, you already blew the luck.


Cool!

amazing story! makes me wonder why the old owner removed the hard drive though before he threw it out...hmm

In light of this post I will spend all night driving the streets looking for macs! Thats really awesome!

Congrats! Amazing what people will throw out. Even a broken down Mac Pro is worth money!

Maybe I should stick my broken MacBook out my the curb. Haha! Wonder if the story would make it back here.

Scribs20 said:

amazing story! makes me wonder why the old owner removed the hard drive though before he threw it out...hmm

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If anyone took it, and he didn't delete his data...


There might then be 'two husbands', if you get what I am saying.

That is an awesome story. Reminds me of something that happened to me once.

Scribs20 said:

amazing story! makes me wonder why the old owner removed the hard drive though before he threw it out...hmm

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Probably had important info on there...or pics he didn't want floating around. >_>"

Wow you are super lucky. I'm surprised that he would just throw something like that out, just because it wouldn't boot. He could have sold the thing for parts.

Amazing story. Too bad things like that don't happen to me very often. Closes thing to that was finding a 100 dollar bill when I was eight years old outside of a dry cleaners. I still have the bill. ^-^"

That is sweet! Congratz. I think I would have grabbed the computer and held it in my arms as I walked to the door just encase someone else was to drive and and decide they wanted it! haha

That is cool, but sorry to burst your bubble... that is how all of us on MF got our computers! ;D




I think I can speak for all when I say, I WISH!!!

Yeah, I couldn't believe that they were going to throw it out either. However, I did find it in a very wealthy part of town, where a $2500 plus computer probably isn't all that much of an investment, and isn't even worth getting repaired.

I picked up some more RAM tonight after work and got it up to 3 GB. Too bad it is hooked up to an ancient Dell LCD. I think I am going to sell it and use the money towards a new MacBook Pro. I am typing on my fiancee's niece's unibody MacBook right now, and I have to say I am in love with the looks of it, and the trackpad.

BTW I bought two scratch offs tonight too.. no luck.

Wow, unbelievable. I can honestly say I am very envious of you right now.