Should see an old 6th gen i5 mini PC on a power monitor. It's basically nothing!

If you go near college housing there's usually a given day of the year (either moving day or an official cleanup day) when tons of people put out stuff they don't want to bother with keeping/moving. It's Hippie Christmas baby!

About to be? The bottom has been falling out for desktops and laptops on processors not on Microsoft's supported list for the last year or more. I've seen roughly the same system go from ~$200+ down to under $100 on the last year based on eBay pricing alone

I think it's secretly Khajiit's new marketplace for wares if you have the coin

eBay, work, friends/family, friendly ask of your work's IT person, or just call up the local recycling/ecycling company and ask

Jesus 25W is about what a miniPC would consume at a constant 30-50% load!

Honestly, if you're in the States I have a bunch of HP ProDesks that my wife would be very happy to see disappear from our basement (I bid on an auction I didn't expect to win lol). I'd happily send one for the cost of shipping

Power consumption is a massive reason to really not do that. Its cheap for a reason, its takes a shitload of power to be shit and you will pay more in energy than you save in hardware unless its only powered on for short periods of time

Ewaste computers actually tend to be on par if not better than an RPi in power consumption these days. It might feel like a RPi should be more efficient given the size and USB power connector, but modern Pis consume a solid 10-20w while in use which is more or similar to most miniPCs (they idle at single digit watts now and can "race to sleep" more effectively than a Pi) while costing about the same and the Pi is far less upgradeable

Brilliant pick. This is the kind of energy that will get the Midwest to drive this national election and bring enough casserole for everyone at the potluck

Others have heavily covered the legality portion of this but I want to point out one other key factor: any employer that tries to pull this kind of shit clearly has a significant employee retention problem, and they're trying to fix it by trapping their employees financially rather than getting to the root of the problem.

Refuse to sign this agreement and find another job. If they let you join without signing this agreement keep applying elsewhere because you'll almost certainly learn very quickly why they have such a bad employee retention problem

Reminds me of the old joke "what's the difference between libertarians and republicans? Libertarians know the legal age of consent in all 50 states"