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My home desktop computer is one I found on the side of the road that someone was throwing out. I opened it up to have a look to see if there were any useful bits inside - memory, HDD etc, and it all looked pretty good, apart from the fact that it looked like someone had spilt a cup of coffee or something on/in it. So I took it home, stripped it, cleaned all the gunk out, washed it in isopropanol, dried it out, and switched it on - runs perfectly! Took me about 10 minutes to hack the Win10 password. It's a high-end gaming computer and I was tempted to go online and play some of the games that were on it, but as I'd probably get killed in the first 2 minutes, I thought that might be a bit mean and that 'Jake' (original coffee-spilling owner) would wonder what the hell happened, so I just ended up formatting the SSD and reinstalling Win10 and other stuff.
My laptop is about 8 years old and was getting a bit slow, so I replaced the HDD with a SSD, added another 4 GBq of memory, a new battery and a clean install of everything and it's now a lot faster than when it was new and even faster than some of the current laptops around.
One of the biggest improvements you can do is a clean install of the operating system and software. Takes a day or so, but the computer runs so much better.
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