After 30 odd years of working with computers, one finds oneself with a large collection of “spare parts”. It is amazing that every box I open up seems to have some bit or other. So last night I started a spring cleanup of spare parts.
Step one: remove items from box and place inside clear transparent plastic box
Step two: put new plastic box back up on shelf
Done!

Actually it is more than that 🙂
Old sound cards, network cards and video cards are going to e-waste recycling. I’ve got two very old 20gb IDE hard drives that are going as well… once they get wiped clean. You never know what may be left on an old hard drive, especially in the cache/temp files/ etc.
So we are waiting here, listening to a very LOUD Western Digital drive (dating back to 2000 June) as it is going through a bit-wipe in maybe 20 minutes. The other was a Maxtor dating back to 2001 October.
Finally a 3rd drive, maxtor 40gb with no clear text date of manufacture.

I did start another clear plastic box that I keep relevant, useful and needed bits that I might actually use in the next few months or year or so. This includes some PCI USB2 cards, PCI firewire cards, usb-serial adapters, usb-parallel adapter, various RAM chips, and some not-that-old 40Gb IDE drives which I preinstalled with operating systems ready-to-go if needed. Lotsa fun!