What's a computer that's in great shape, has all the essentials (keyboard, mouse, speakers, monitor etc.), and costs only a meager $200? A Compaq Presario 7470. This baby powers boats, factories, diesel engines, rocket engines, nuclear reactors, and God.  Don't let its beige color and cumbersome design fool you. It's big and bulky, but it works.  I mean, shucks! The fact that it works, isn't that what matters? And did I mention that it's in great shape?  I can't help shaking my head at how amazing of a deal this is. You simply can't get this anywhere else.

Because it's so. Damn. Old.

Right, so it's in great shape.  Or so says the local guy posting this clever ad on Craigslist, sitting smugly, rubbing his hands intently and buhahaing at the next technologically inept senior citizen he's about to bait and rip off.    

CL is a good place for finding strikingly superb deals and, sadly, a place to weasel and scam the unknowing, but I couldn't help but laugh at what this man was trying to sell for $200.  It's equipped with a 533 mhz AMD processor a silly 10GB hard drive and, god-forbid, Windows 98.  You don't have to be a geek to know that anything that's still got Win98 installed would quickly rub you the wrong way. Whether they're bad at gauging the proper price for paperweight, or eager enough to make a quick buck off the ignorant, the computer and the ad itself consists of total fail.  Pay $100 more and you can get an el cheapo Dell Inspiron 530s loaded with a celeron processor, 250GB HD, 2 gigs of DDR2 RAM, with decent onboard sound and video suitable for doing simple office tasks.  

What's this Presario worth? It's worth zero, unless you're savvy enough to run some Linux distro or turn it into a standalone hardware firewall just for kicks, you're better off donating it -- either to charity or the landfill.