With only three weeks remaining until I move out of my current apartment, and having a free night last night, I undertook to reduce some of the computer-parts mess that was in my room. I had one small-ish plastic tub full of things, two extra computer cases with almost functional computers inside, and an entire drawer of my dresser full of wires and spare parts.
** editors note: this is probably not the most interesting thing to read, sorry 🙂 **
I started with the cases, stripping out all the parts that looked useful, wound up with:
- 3 IDE hard drives of unknown size
- 6 sticks of PC133 SDRAM of mostly unknown size, a few marked as 128 meg sticks
- A 16 meg TNT2Â AGP video card
- 2 PCI ethernet cards
- An AGP video card of unknown stats
- A PCI sound card
After a minute of though I realized nothing was worth the storage space to even salvage… most of that stuff is so far beyond obsolete I couldn’t use it for anything. I suppose somewhere there is someone looking for those parts to keep an old system running, but that’s not me. (and if that person is reading this, price out what $500 will buy you in new hardware, cry, then put in your newegg order)
Then I moved on to the plastic tub, it was mostly full of empty CD cases, converter plugs, case screws, anti-static bags and IDE cables. I have been storing the CD cases from my freshmen year in the dorms as I recall… after 8 years without needing them I think I can part with them. the IDE cables are rapidly becoming useless, but I kept a few. There was some DDR memory in there, but again I have no idea what size the 2 sticks were, or why they are setting there. I have vague memories of mothballing some memory that came out of an unstable system, but I can’t remember if that’s what this is or something else. Couldn’t bring myself to toss the DDR, and the bags of screws will be sticking around, I always wind up needing one or two more than they ship with a new system. (unless of course they always short me on the same kind, and then I just have a huge collection of the wrong screw)
Last, but not least, the drawer full of cables! It turns out I had about 20 basic computer power cables, probably 100 feet of S-Video cable (in 6′ sections), and enough ethernet cable to rewire my entire apartment network 3-4 times. I tossed out all but 2 of the S-Video and power cables, but couldn’t bring myself to part with any ethernet cable (its only been in storage for 1.5 years, I might still need it!)
In the end I managed to compress my entire computer junk storage into the single plastic tub, and threw out well over 50 pounds of computer-related junk.
On reflection, a few notes:
- Storing more than 2 spares of anything is just silly
- I need to label things that go into storage
- Hard drives, even when installed into a PC should have their size and date purchased written on them
- All driver disks should have a date, and what computer they go to written on them
hopefully I can prevent myself from getting that much stuff piled up again, but at least if it has labels on it, sorting will go faster the next time 🙂
-Jordan
Nelsons 