Boobie Prize

Over the weekend I decided to clean out the guest room closet.  It was the place where I dumped a bunch of stuff that I wasn’t sure what to do with when I moved.  It was a case of out-of-sight, out-of-mind.  It’s also where I keep all my suitcases and extra gun cases as well as the vacuum cleaner.  So every time I wanted to get to some of those items I was confronted with the pile-o-crap in there.

One of the things I kept in there was a stack of old computers and cases.  There were two whole computers, one empty case, and one partial computer (an old K6-2 450 missing a hard drive).  I pulled all of these out and it made quite a difference in the amount of useable space.  Since I didn’t really have a use for them, and they were pretty old I decided to pull out any useful parts and ditch what was left.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with these parts, but here’s the haul:

  • Three PCI video cards (two TGUI9660’s and one unknown 3Dfx card)
  • Two modems (one ISA)
  • Three LNE100TX 10/100 Ethernet cards (PCI)
  • A SoundBlaster 32PNP (ISA)
  • Three hard drives (2.5 GB, 4.0 GB, and 1.6GB)
  • Two ATX 2.0 300 watt power supplies (Antec and PC Power & Cooling)
  • Three CD-ROM drives (24X to 48X)
  • An ASUS P5A with a K6-2 450 and 128MB of RAM
  • One full tower Inwin case (sans power supply)

Most of it isn’t very useful, but I just couldn’t bring myself to throw it out.  The hard drives I kept because I didn’t want any of the data to get out and I didn’t feel like messing with them to wipe the drives.  I suppose I could throw these parts together and make a system that could be used for web browsing and email (and probably put Linux on it, since it seems to work better with underpowered hardware than Windows, not to mention it’s a lot cheaper).  But I don’t have a need for such a system.

Anyhow, I put the two old computers and one empty case out on the street at 6:15am.  By 7:45am when I went out again both of the semi-whole computers were gone and the side of the empty case was off.  Obviously whomever took the other two decided that a completely bare case wasn’t worth messing with.

The two old computers were a Cyrix 133 (P5 equivalent) and a Pentium MMX 200, circa 1996.  So I suspect the person who took them won’t be getting quite the prize he or she expected.  Not to mention that I stripped them such that only the power supply, motherboard, processor, and memory were left.

2 Comments

  1. Cinomed says:

    Yeah, the few tiems I set a computer case out on the curb, it is gone within an hour, always.
    Really kinda funny, but ya know what, I was like that at one time, used to drag home all kinds of stuff like that.

  2. Yep.  Who knows, perhaps someone could find some use for it. 

    One of my coworkers remarked to me me today that dumpster diving is sort of a sport among some people.  It used to amaze me what another of our coworkers used to find.  I’ve never been that lucky (or perhaps I’m just not frequenting the right places).