Sunday, September 12, 2010

So, What Do You Do With A Junk Computer?

It's coming up on a year since my last computer died. Don't really know what happened to it -- it just suddenly decided it only wanted to turn off or turn on on occasion, and would occasionally do some kind of funky maneuvers while it was running, so I opted for a new computer.

Not that I minded -- it was old and my wife had a better one and I was jealous, so, well, a new computer came.

But I kept the old one because, well, you never know.

A week ago, to fix another old computer, I took a CD drive out of my defunct one and popped it in the other. That required a half hour of moving boxes and cussing stuff out of the way to get the old computer out from under the stairs.

I don't want to have to do that again. So tonight I cussed that box back out and dismantled the old computer, putting the best of the old parts into a very compact little box for future use. The rest is going to go away.

What I kept:

Hard drive
Floppy drive
Memory (a whopping 756 MB)
Modem/ethernet card

I thought about saving fans and power supply, but they were all rather dirt-encrusted, so I've decided to chuck them. I wonder, however, is there more stuff I should be saving? What do you save from your old computers? (By old, I mean 5+ years. This is why the motherboard and the power supply went/will soon go to the trash.) And yes, I'll recycle what I can. But where I live, recycling means driving a 60-mile round trip because there are no local recyclers. Green karma is a little hard to come by here.

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