I go to Value Village a lot. Value Village (aka Savers) is pretty much a massive thrift store where you can find all sorts of cool stuff. They used to sell a lot of computers at this particular store, but I wrote a page on why they don't anymore.

So, I'm going through as always, looking for anything cool. I found some nice old speakers which I then fried by plugging into a PSU with the wrong polarity (at the electrical testing station). Moving on, I found a MiniDisc player/recorder with a horribly leaked battery, a strange box that lets you plug your telephone into USB for "Skype calls"??? Just an ultra cheap and flimsy box that definitley did not have the permission to plaster the Skype logo all over it. I was tempted to buy it, but remembered that it's USELESS.

That's all the stuff I didn't buy, but I ended up buying an Acer Aspire AX1400-E3802 from 2010. A small low profile system with "similar" but worse specs to the E520 in SOME ways. I planned to fix it up a little and possibly use it as a video player or other small PC, not sure yet.

And that was it, but on my way out, I glanced into the back room through where the donation dropoff is. When you drop off at Value Village, your stuff pretty much just gets thrown into the back room of the building to be "sorted". Sorted as in "sell it on auction because it's worth something", "put on the shelves", or "throw it away", and I think that most of the old computers and tech that is donated are unfortunatley tossed out without a chance on the shelves.

And when I walked past, I saw sitting on the floor in the back room, a fricken CRT monitor. 12 years ago, NOBODY would bat an eye at a CRT monitor sitting next to a bin, but right now, CRTs have somehow become retro gold, and you'll be paying through the roof for the monitor AND shipping if you want to buy one on eBay.

The back room of the store is very off limits, but I knew what I had to do, I had to at least try. So I just went on and walked into the back of the store, and said "can I buy that?" as I pointed to the CRT on the floor.

And the lady working in the back just looked at me and...

lady: "you actually want that?"...
me: "ya"
lady: "... um, 10 dollars. Is that ok?"
me: "yeah sure"

And just like that, with 10 less dollars in my pocket, I was now the proud owner of a CRT monitor in 2022.

The monitor in question is a Seanix S-17HM08 (possibly a rebranded Hansol 701P?) from Sep 1999. Seanix Technologies (1986 - 2009) was a PC manufacturer from Richmond, BC, around where I found the monitor.

Currently, the monitor is in the garage with the Windows XP machine, and being a desktop case with the monitor on top, they go quite well together. I was pretty impressed with this monitor, it seems like it was a pretty high end monitor in its day. I normally have it running on the XP machine at 1024x768 @ 75hz, but you can bring it up to 1280x1024, and it can even push 120hz refresh! (at lower resolutions)..Windows 10 pisses itself with this monitor and says its 1hz. lol

Overall for 10bux I think this monitor was a pretty good score, and I've been very impressed with its performance. As always, never be afraid to ask. If I didn't ask about it, this monitor would've just been sent to "e-waste" to be shipped to China to be mutilated for 2 cents of copper than then destroyed and burned (rip the environment). I highly believe in reusing as much as possible, so if you see something heading for the bin, don't ever be afraid to ask if you can have it.

three : self