Party Vibe

I find second hand IT stuff either broken or so old it is no good for man or beast or if it works it is overpriced. If you were to buy a system the best bet is friday-ad your more likely to get an old home pc that hasn’t been used much. I wouldn’t rely on a hard drive over 4 years old and at £30 for a new one is money well spent.

You could try http://www.freecycle.org as there are always monitors and all sorts of other pc bits offered, but recycling things like crt moniors is possibly not as enviomentally good as the crt is probably running at 200 – 250watts where as a new lcd screen only runs 20-30 watts of power.

As for cooling I quite often use old fans from blown psu’s or pc’s . They are rated at 12v but run silently and effectively on 9v. Get an old transformer from cordless phone or such like, most are 9v and wire it to the fan. Excellent for racks or sets of external drives. I also use them on the power amp as well for extra cooling through the grills. They also wire directly in to a car electrical system 12v, great if your power amp in the boot starts to cook

I have a box of fans somewhere if you want them – I strip them out of other folks machines when they are messing the airflow up with them.