My old friend from grade school days is a thrift store superstar.  He finds all kinds of treasures that you would never imagine at Goodwill and other second-hand shops.  Over the past year or so, sometimes I will take him and another old friend, Jeff, on what we call “Shopping Safaris” where we hit all the Goodwill stores in the Tri-City area.

Today was such a day.  We started off with a great breakfast at Denny’s including plenty of caffeine and protein.  Next stop was the Goodwill in Richland.  I always head to the electronics section first, so I did.  I saw what looked like a computer monitor and went in to check it out.  Turns out it was an HP Envy 20 All-In-One computer with a price tag of only $30.  Plugged it into the power supply and hit the power button.  Wouldn’t boot because likely it had no operating system or even hard disk.  But the screen looked great and everything else looked to be in good shape as well.  So I bought it, of course!  Also on the Safari I picked up some nice art including a couple of paintings, some solid brass sailboat sculptures, and other decor.

After returning home from the Safari, I tore into the HP and installed an mSATA SSD,  a straight old 2.5 inch SSD, and some extra RAM I had laying around.  The hard drive caddy was missing, so I ordered one of those on eBay for about seven dollars.  But the SSD is light enough to be held in place by the connector alone, so I just buttoned it all back up.  Linux was already on the mSATA from a previous notebook SSD upgrade I did a few days ago.  To my pleasant surprise, it all booted up and works just fine.  Even the touch screen driver modules seem to have been automatically detected and loaded by Ubuntu.  I am writing this post on the computer right now, in fact.

Also ordered a Core i5 CPU upgrade on eBay, since it only has a Core i3.  I may also order 2x8GB SODIMMs to boost the RAM.  Right now it “only” has 8GB, which is plenty, but I like to max RAM out whenever possible.  Searching for complete HP Envy 20 computers on eBay, they seem to be running anywhere from $250 to $300.  So today was some really great Goodwill hunting!!