Originally an office rental company gave me permission to pick through their ewaste bins (they’re unsecured and provided with no guarantees, though I do take care to wipe any drives that haven’t been done already). From them, it was really inconsistent, sometimes I’d find brand new laptops, monitors, TVs, etc, because a company had to move suddenly or just upgraded and the laptops would be good quality and ready to go (once they already had the drives wiped and stacked in a second pile) other times they’d be stripped almost down to the motherboard, stained with coffee, and I’d have to buy a bunch of replacement parts to get them usable again. More recently, friends and relatives and neighbors have heard about this project and started giving me their old laptops to fix and give away. These tend to be working and cleaner than the ewaste ones, though a little anemic in RAM or hard drives. I had budgeted up to $35ish per laptop, so I buy whatever they’re missing used on ebay and ask for components on my local Buy Nothing page (which is where I originally was giving the computers away). If one laptop is already good, I’ll put it’s budget towards one of the problem ones.