Hoarding Old Tech - I Might Need A 64 Meg AGP graphics Card Sometime

[Never Scored]

This is a thread to talk about the hoard of useless ewaste we've all built up over the years. I know you all have one too.

I gut out my little hovel that the wife looks the other way and lets me pack with shit today. Some of the shit I cleared out and took to ewaste:

-An Asus EEE Slider that won't turn on.
-Not one but two 32-bit 2008 era Intel Atom netbooks. These were the hardest to part with.
-A Kobo ereader I loaded custom firmware and never touched again like a decade ago
-Six old Power Supplies
-Five DVD Drives, I don't even know if they all work
-A Kangaroo PC I bought new which was a terrible mistake

I still have a couple of things like various pci express cards and a Thinkpad T420 I know I have to trash, but I don't have the heart to. Anyone else have trouble parting with old parts and shit even though you know they're useless?

 

[Jimmy Durante's Ballsack]

I have a whole area in my basement filled with two and a half decades worth of old PCs.

Never throw out your old hardware. That's how they get you.

 

[Pixy]

Cassette players and radios. It's just for repairing the mechanisms, I swear. Unfortunately it's turned into a completely filled box of things I'll never get around to fixing.

 

[MrTroll]

Remember, kids, if you hold on to your old junk long enough, eventually it will become vintage, and vintage is worth $$$. This applies to everything: video games, pc parts, comic books, old newspapers, even toothbrushes. Never throw anything away, ever. It's like throwing out gold. That shoe box full of old IDE cables in my closet is a long-term investment.

 

[Marissa Moira]

I was thinking about hoarding old DVD drives, but the newer USB DVD and Blu-Ray drives seem to work just as well and are easier to install.

 

[Exigent Circumcisions]

I wish I'd kept all the laser diodes out of my old cd/dvd drives so I could make irresponsible toys out of them. Ah well.

 

[Un Platano]

I've got a shitload of VGA cables and not a single computer left in my house that can use one. I don't like throwing out any kind of wires because at the end of the day, a wire is a wire and you don't know what weird uses you might find for one. At the same time, I realize that the amount of times I will probably ever need to use a VGA or RCA cable for something anymore is far smaller than the amount of them I currently own.

 

[Marissa Moira]

I've got a shitload of VGA cables and not a single computer left in my house that can use one. I don't like throwing out any kind of wires because at the end of the day, a wire is a wire and you don't know what weird uses you might find for one. At the same time, I realize that the amount of times I will probably ever need to use a VGA or RCA cable for something anymore is far smaller than the amount of them I currently own.

The answer to this problem is to buy a VGA monitor and do a PC build that's entirely geared towards getting the highest resolution and frame rate out of a VGA output.

Bonus points if you get LED lights and a matching PC case to do a retro wave aesthetic.

a set of lights only costs you about ten bucks, and if the PC case is large enough you could probably throw in a tiny roman bust inside the case. Also configure it to run windows 3.1 or Windows 95.

 

[The Last Stand]

Oldest thing we've kept for a bit was an Atari 2600 with the wooden finish.

And a rotary telephone.

 

[I Love Beef]

I'm not much of a techie, but as I tip toe on the boundaries, I keep around DVDs and VHS tapes of old media I enjoy, as much as video games I really want in physical form.

When I was younger, I wasn't exactly blessed with the greatest opportunity for a stable allowance, so I mainly got my entertainment online, and any time I got to go to a secondhand bookstore or video store was very rare, and said allowance left me still wanting more because I could barely buy anything more than one item. As I got older, not only did a job allow me the chance for a disposable income, but I still was somewhat fond over those youthful times before I became a legal adult; not merely because of nostalgia, but for what memories and inspiration still stuck with me strongly, and I just kept on buying older physical media. Later on, I did hear about Blu-Ray, but I wasn't exactly impressed, and as James Rolfe explained, Blu-Ray is kinda shitty. VHS is both a bit of emotional and nostalgic attachment, as well as historic importance, while DVDs fulfills that and I also I like them for their presentation and ease of use. Blu-Ray I heard trades both convenience and charm for hi-definition resolution stuff that I can honestly care less about, while menus are bland and uninspired, and they do not play back where you left off if you stopped the player.

I did lose most of my stuff in very shitty events of unfortunate occurrences, but that's not very much money can't fix. I also still enjoy the idea of going to Goodwills, charity stores and other secondhand places to find old anime VHS tapes. Sometimes, I also come across tapes from regional corporate branches that are instructional videos for employees, those are fun to find too.

 

[Spasticus Autisticus]

A lot of my old hardware from the 1998-2004 period was saved. Among the goodies include:

• a dual Pentium III Coppermine 800 MHz with 1 GB ECC RAM full system, still working apart from the IBM Deathstar HDs and the NIC
• some motherboards with CPUs (AMD K6-2, Athlon original, Athlon XP), all need recapping
• a bunch of AGP video cards, including a Voodoo3 3500 and two Geforce 2s
• a Sound Blaster 16 PnP, and a Sound Blaster Live
• an HP Jornada PDA (remember PDAs?)

I also have a 386SX laptop, which powers on but doesn't boot, probably because the NiCd CMOS batteries leaked. I would love to get this working again and play some really old DOS games on it. Pretty sure I can just replace the CMOS batteries with new NiMH batteries, but it's going to be a pain to wire them up. I wish I could find something like my old 286 and 386 PCs (I'll always be mad at my parents for giving away my 386 when we moved) but they're pricey on eBay even before the shipping.

There is a store in this area that sells old hardware, which is a lot of fun to browse, although they know the value of what they have so it's rare to find any really good deals.

I'm not much of a techie, but as I tip toe on the boundaries, I keep around DVDs and VHS tapes of old media I enjoy, as much as video games I really want in physical form.

One of my biggest regrets is not keeping more of my old games. I still have some, but a lot of them are missing and I can't remember what happened to them. Moving around a lot will do that. GOG does stand in fairly well for that, but installing off of the original CDs or floppies can be an experience in itself. And then there are some games that still aren't available on any platform and may never be, like No One Lives Forever, which is one of those that I lost.

 

[Rozzy]

I still have a couple of things like various pci express cards and a Thinkpad T420 I know I have to trash, but I don't have the heart to. Anyone else have trouble parting with old parts and shit even though you know they're useless?

Why trash unwanted tech when it can be sold even if it's together as a lot for spares? Surely it would be better to get $100 for a lot of tech rather than throwing it away and getting nothing? Another option for old tech rather than throwing it is to ask friends, family or a local computer repair shop if they want it for free. A quick look at E-Bay shows Thinkpad T420s are still very much saleable even if not working.

My preferences for dealing with unwanted tech.
1) sell online or local
2) give to friends or family
3) give to computer repair store
4) trash/recycle

 

[Mr. Skeltal]

Me:
An H110 ITX motherboard I picked up for $10, no idea if it works.
Asus ATX Z97 motherboard, which shorted out the first PCIe 16x slot. Integrated graphics will still work with a system built on this.
My first GTX 970, which aforementioned motherboard shorted out.
My old Intel rig (i5 4690k, second 970, Gigabyte Z97 mobo, 8GB of G. Skills Ripjaws DDR3) sitting in mobo and GPU boxes in the closet. All compenents work.
Old Hyper 212 Evo and Wraith Spire coolers.
Scuffed Lenovo laptop from college that will still power on if I pray for long enough.
A selection of Atari 2600 games I picked up from a thrift store for ~$10. No console to go with, no idea if they work.
An old NVME PCIe 1x expansion card for old Intel machine. May get reused.
Dead SteelSeries Sensei mouse that my cat destroyed.
Old S7 Edge that still functions but just barely so.
1st gen xbone controller with a wonky right shoulder button. Needs a fix tbh.
Too many fucking micro-b cables. Half of them are broken. What a shit standard.
Cool old Nature Company clock/thermometer/barometer that I managed to fix.
Audio cassettes for my old car's tape deck.

The Mrs:
A whole bookshelf of VHS tapes and DVDs, complete with an ancient combo VCR/DVD player.
Several old laptops including a now bricked Macbook. Thanks Apple.
A PS2 with a selection of games.
A collection of iPhones going back to the 3G. None of them aside from her old 6s work.
An iPod.

She'll inherit my old Intel machine when I get around to buying a new power supply, case, and storage, so I suppose that isn't "junk" per se, but whatever.

 

[L50LasPak]

Big feels on the cords thing. It actually used to be way worse, I had cords for parallel ports even though I never owned anything old enough to use them. Stubby and useless HDMI cables were also a bane of my existence for a long time because I acquired a bunch of them back when HDMIs were a pain in the ass to find, and it took someone just straight up giving me a ten-footer for free to convince me to get rid of them.

Cell phone chargers are another thing that anyone who had to deal with mid-2000s tech has cable PTSD about. It seemed like every single model of flip phone had a different charger of some kind and I wound up with a shoebox full of them between the phones I had, the phones my family members had and the random cords I'd acquire picking through tech garbage at work.

 

[Basil II]

the problem with old tech is that even today it advances so quickly that in about 5 years even the highest end becomes obsolete compared to the newest low end. Retro tech outside of vintage game consoles and other computers with unique software just seem like they belong in a museum.

 

[Never Scored]

Why trash unwanted tech when it can be sold even if it's together as a lot for spares? Surely it would be better to get $100 for a lot of tech rather than throwing it away and getting nothing? Another option for old tech rather than throwing it is to ask friends, family or a local computer repair shop if they want it for free. A quick look at E-Bay shows Thinkpad T420s are still very much saleable even if not working.
View attachment 1751781
My preferences for dealing with unwanted tech.
1) sell online or local
2) give to friends or family
3) give to computer repair store
4) trash/recycle

Whoa, maybe I'll list the Thinkpad and try it out. I didn't expect it to be worth more than $100. I can pop an old hard drive in there, it has a Wndows 10 Pro license. However, I learned last year trying to sell the Acer AspireOne ZG5 and the Lenovo S10 Atom netbooks that just because something is listed for a certain price on eBay, doesn't mean anyone's actively buying it.

I live somewhere very isolated, the city and surrounding area has about 200,000 people and then the next city is 1,000 miles away. I don't think I could even give them away locally. There's not a lot of demand.

 

[Stasi]

Whoa, maybe I'll list the Thinkpad and try it out. I didn't expect it to be worth more than $100. I can pop an old hard drive in there, it has a Wndows 10 Pro license. However, I learned last year trying to sell the Acer AspireOne ZG5 and the Lenovo S10 Atom netbooks that just because something is listed for a certain price on eBay, doesn't mean anyone's actively buying it.

I live somewhere very isolated, the city and surrounding area has about 200,000 people and then the next city is 1,000 miles away. I don't think I could even give them away locally. There's not a lot of demand.

Yep, thinkpads are pretty sought after so should get a decent price.

If you want to get rid of something try the 'sold listings' filter. That will give an idea on how to price something so it actually sells, a lot of listings will have bullshit prices that no one will ever pay and if you price similar they will just sit there with no bids.

 

[Rozzy]

the problem with old tech is that even today it advances so quickly that in about 5 years even the highest end becomes obsolete compared to the newest low end. Retro tech outside of vintage game consoles and other computers with unique software just seem like they belong in a museum.

Maybe cellphones and tablets becoming obsolete in 5 years but can't say the same for notebook and desktop PCs.
The Intel core i7-5960X of 2014 has an impressive score for an almost 7 year old CPU, it's not quite up to the demands of the latest gaming PCs but is still plenty of power for non-gaming uses.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-5960X+%40+3.00GHz&id=2332

I like this website for checking benchmarks of CPUs it's useful for making comparisons.

PassMark Software - CPU Benchmarks

PassMark Software - CPU Benchmarks - Over 1 million CPUs and 1,000 models benchmarked and compared in graph form, updated daily!

www.cpubenchmark.net

The main website with benchmarks for everything.

https://www.passmark.com/

 

[AmpleApricots]

Tons of old PC, Amiga and C64/128 hardware. For the Amiga besides every speedgrade of accelerator for A500/A1200/A2000 I have some of the more exotic hardware like graphics cards, video toasters, hardware MPEG1-decoders, TBCs, custom 24-bit Framebuffer hardware from small french and german engineering shops with fitting software and all you need to run a production grade TV-studio in the 80s. (and yes, I would know how to run such a setup too, remember your local weather channel that also broadcast news and weather data in text at night? I can set you up a station in 80s broadcast quality with period correct hardware and I know how to run it. Most useless skill in 2020 ever.) Also have an miniscule amount of 68k Mac hardware. (it wasn't very widespread in my country) I picked through the dissolution of an old Commodore repair shop and probably have enough custom ICs to do a limited run of old chipset Amigas, early C64s and some types of PC. (Only thing I don't have is the fitting DRAM) One of these days I will design that ITX-form factor Amiga but it's not today.

Much of the PC hardware is your usual old Pentium but I also have a few industrial grade SBCs from my old work I did back then. (like small 486 and 386 computers and the occasional 286 on an ISA-sized card) Lots of really old PC hardware like EGA cards and specialized graphics cards for DOS CAD software too. I also have some newer pieces like the occasional Voodoo 5 for example.

Lots I took home from work places or through people I knew in tech but I also bought a some of this stuff mostly out of boredom and just to collect something, like people sometimes collect random crap. It used to be a very cheap hobby (e.g. the commodore ICs basically the owner just gave me so he didn't need to dispose of them) and it was something to do, you know? I genuinely thought most of the stuff would end up in the trash and forgotten by modern society, I had no idea there would be this level of interest one day. I also saw a lot of things people salivate over today go into the trash without batting an eye, like old SGI workstations I had no room for. Since retro is in and the prices blew up, I didn't buy anything anymore. It stopped being fun.

I used to also have *a lot* of old Amiga games, even still in it's original boxes with manuals etc. I threw all that stuff away in the late 90s/early 00s when I moved a lot for a time. I still have hundreds of old floppy disks though.

I have never tried to figure out what all this stuff is worth but it's probably worth something.

 

[Stasi]

Most of my hoarded stuff is game related - a GBA SP, Mega Drive, PS1 and PS2. I had a bunch of nintendo consoles but sold them just before a house move. Despite being into old tech I have strangely not accumulated too much, probably because my family is good at passing stuff around as hand me downs - my grandparents still have my c2007 era Acer Aspire I gave them after my parents gave me a newer Compaq. I also don't care to keep up with the latest cutting edge stuff (my daily driver is a Thinkpad x230 which to most people is ancient) so reduces amount of times I get new tech.

A bunch of much older stuff was sadly lost or tossed out during various house moves, would have loved to have some of this stuff now:

• An old 90s era all in one PC (I don't even remember if it was a Mac or 486 or something)
• A Pentium 4 Dell desktop and an old e-machines PC rocking an AMD Sempron (future-proof amirite)
• Keyboards (I miss my massive HP keyboard with a huge volume knob)
• A bunch of smaller tech that went in the trash - cassette players, palmtop pcs, god knows how many old phones