WARNING: I’m in a compgeeky mood right now, so if that’s not your cuppa, pass right on by, move along, nothing to see here… 🙂
Today was eaten by locusts, and I still didn’t get anything on my to-do lists done… *sigh* Backlog of post material… ah, it’ll all be dated by the time I get to it, anyway. *heh* *But you don’t think that’ll stop me, do you? :-))
This just in from John Dvorak tiptoe-ing through the keyboard (last week–I’m further behind than that, but I’ll cherrypick this one cos it’s easy):
The Junk Lifestyle and Hyper-Depreciation
Most old tech gear is worthless. So why do I let it pile up?
Gee, that’s an easy one, John. Here’s an example. I have stacks of old CRT monitors piled up in the basement (and a couple sitting around unused here in my office and another in the network closet and… you get the picture). Old 17″, 15″ and even some way, way old 14″ monitors just sitting there working on disappearing as they work through their half-lives.
So why do I have them (and that stack of 10 or twelve keyboards, the bozes of mice, old Pentium comps and even a couple of old 486s, etc.)?
Here’s the example: Son & Heir came home for Spring Break cos he has LOADS of schoolwork to do to stay even–hundreds of pages of reading for one class alone. Brought his computer with him but left his monitors at school (yeh, two; whadda ya wanna make of it? :-)).
Popped a spare 17″ (well, taken out of service on the computer I cleared out to give him desk space) and… no joy. No pic. Weird. Not gonna mess with it. So… toddled on off to another room did we and brought back a couple of spare oldies but goodies. In business.
Of course, I could have dragged one out of my office, or even taken one out of service on another computer, but this way, eeeeeverybody’s happy, no sweat, no hassle, no downtime. Easy-peasy.
And that, Mr. Dvorak, is why I keep piles of “junk” around: I never know when I will need a peripheral, some memory, a vidcard, whatever, and when I need it I do NOT need it after a trip to a store or a wait on UPS, I need it NOW. It might not be the latest and greatest, but if I can make it work and keep things up and running, it’s Good Enough for “right now”–and that’s the key ingredient.
Oh, and I never know when I might want to use an old (otherwise “useless”) piece of junk or three to build another firewall/router or a fileserver or some other one-purpose machine that can do with a 14″ monitor to set it up and an array of old SCSI drives and some slow memory and an otherwise useless 4MB PCI vidcard or whatever.
You just never know what neat lil niche toys can come out of a scrap parts bin. 🙂
Trackposted to The Pink Flamingo, Stuck On Stupid, The Bullwinkle Blog, The Random Yak, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, and Maggie’s Notebook, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.