Summer is a wonderful season for bargain hunters. Saturday mornings they (we?) scan the newspaper ads, then head out following hand-written signs to garage sales. At the sight of a line-up of parked cars at one house on an otherwise empty street or country road my car always pulls to the right.

This summer, along with the usual boxes of books and unused wedding gifts, some new items have been showing up - computers and all their assorted appendages - printers, software, disk storage boxes (great for CD's), cables. With the advent of Pentium processors, and Windows 95 (now 98), these old machines are considered obsolete. However, if they are in good working order, they may be a terrific bargain.

Originally, the most common use of a computer was as a word processor. Lotus 1-2-3, the original spreadsheet program effectively introduced computers to small businesses, and eventually, homes. This opened a market for software, from accounting programs to flight simulators. Still, for most people, pen & paper, typewriters and calculators were quite sufficient, thank you very much. Who needs the aggravation of lost files and "abort, retry, fail?"

Then, along came the internet, and even the die-hards were sold. You can't send email on a calculator. You can, though, send email, and access the internet, on almost any computer. Of course, once again, the market is flooded with new software, requiring bigger and faster machines. Suddenly everyone wants 3-D pictures and sound - and Windows 98, enough to bring poor old 386 to it's knees. So, out it goes with the aluminum pans and the fondue pots.

One man's trash can now become another's treasure. That "obsolete" machine is still quite capable of running Word Perfect or older accounting programs (does anyone really care about graphics when doing their taxes), games (thousands of DOS ones are available free) - and, most definitely, the internet. All the information on the internet is text - plain old letters and numbers. It had to be, in order to be accessable by all types of computers, from Macs and PCs to mainframes. The same goes for email. And, if you are looking at only text, you certainly don't need a Pentium processor or a 56K modem. My 2400-baud modem, rescued from duty as a phone connector, is quite satisfactory.

There are limitations, of course. Many web designers assume that the whole world is wired for 56K modems, and we all have state-of-the-art machines. You won't be able to see their pages. On the other hand, you won't have the frustration of waiting five minutes for a page to load, just to have it lock up your computer. (My advice to these designers, if any of them care: you can either reach a large market, or impress a small one.) Also, ask anyone with a 56K modem what speed they actually attain. For most phone lines in this area, 24K is about the limit. No matter how fast your processor is, it can't process anything until it comes through that bottleneck.

You also need a special "text" internet account with an internet provider. Once the only kind available, and often free ("free nets"), these are still one of the best buys out there.

At the next user group meeting, Garth Scarborough will be demonstrating how to use a text account on an "obsolete" PC (an IBM 286, price tag $25). We'll also be selling used 28.8 modems for $25. Join us on Thursday, August 13 at 7pm at the Lions' Club, Main St., Bobcaygeon for some real bargains.