After many years of lying dormant, I finally put our 20-year-old tower-style desktop computer out to pasture. It hasn’t worked correctly for years (I don’t even know how many), and even if it did work, it’s far too obsolete to be valuable today.
I took it to a local computer repair guy because my wife and I wanted to save any personal files we had on there (family photos, old teacher files of my wife's, music files, etc.), if they could be saved at all (the computer didn’t even start up correctly, so I was skeptical to say the least).
Fortunately, he was in fact able to get the files off of the hard drive. He saved them to a separate drive as well as giving us the old hard drive. I looked through the files saved and couldn’t believe what was on there. There was stuff I didn’t remember we had. Some of it personal, some of it inconsequential, all of it no more recent than 2014. It was like time travel!
So anyway, above is the shell of the desktop, keyboard, speakers, and monitor. We bought this in the early 2000s; definitely before 2006. It ran on Windows XP operating system, and it only had 256K of RAM when we bought it! Soon it will be picked up by an e-recycler or just put in the trash. I can’t imagine any use this equipment would have today.
I can’t say I feel nostalgic about this computer—it really wasn’t very good—but just the fact that it sat in our basement for so, so long—over 15 years at our current home, and at our previous house for a few years before that—and now it won’t, feels weird.
End of old computer rant.
I still have some old machines, as well, that probably could turn up some mildly interesting ephemera (and maybe even better things) with similar attempts at salvage...and then recycling.
ReplyDeleteIt's a weird trip to take, I have to say!
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