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I've always had a bad habit of pulling computers out of the garbage and giving new life to them -- or arguably forcing them to continue to live a life no longer worth living.
Some of the first computers that I remember "saving" were two beige box computers that I found behind an empty strip mall where my friends and I would skateboard. This was sometime in the mid 00s and these had slot-based Pentium IIs within them.
I called my mom and told her where to find me and she'd come to pick me up and take whatever new trash I'd found back home. In this case, it was the two desktops. In another case, it was a rained-upon desk I passed on my way to school.
Somehow, despite them having been left out in the rain for who-knows how long, I was able to cobble together pieces from each of these, as well as pieces I had from other long-dead projects, and end up with at least one working computer.
I don't remember what I ended up running on it -- probably Doom servers, if that.
This comes up because I've been at it again: In the past two years, I've had continually incredible luck for my dumpster finds. Not everything has been a winner--there was recently a find that appeared to be a motherlode with a Macbook Air, Macbook Pro, iBook G4, and an iMac, all of which ended up going to e-waste because I didn't want to go through the work needed to make them usable--but there have been several extremely good finds.
The first was an SFF from e-waste at my work (pre-Covid, of course). My team had been using it as a "supercomputer" and built an absolutely stacked computer for 2016. It had an i7, 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD, and was purchased from the enterprise line, so _supposedly_ it was better quality than the consumer ones.
Of course, it wouldn't have been in e-waste were that the case. We went to log into it one day and found it unresponsive, and when our IT team loked into it, they determined that it wasn't salvagable. They contacted the supplier, who simply replaced it and for whatever reason had no interest in taking it back
Turns out, the only thing wrong with it was that the motherboard had died. My work doesn't strip computers for parts (cheaper to buy new than maintain storage I guess) so once the motherboard was replaced ($100, from China), it booted right up and has been in use ever since. It's currently serving as my home server, acting as a NAS, serving Plex, Nextcloud, etc.
That was over a year ago, and just this past week I had another great find: An enterprise-grade server and 24-port gigabit switch left in an alley. I found out about it from our local Buy Nothing group (if you're not familiar, you should check it out) and quickly went over to have the chance of picking it up.
I only got around to looking at it last night, and it's one hell of a find: it has all of its hot-swappable HDD bays included (they're usually long-gone), 32GB of RAM, a high-tier Xeon from 2012, and still had four drives in the array. I haven't tried booting it yet, but based on the external condition, there's probably not much "refurbishing" to do here.
All that said, I don't think I actually have a use for it, unless I can perhaps move the contents of the SFF into this comically large case and take advantage of the hardware RAID card. I'm sure the SFF, by virtue of being 4 years newer, is much better efficiency-wise and probably across the board as well. We'll see over the coming weeks what I come up with for it.