How Long Do You Hang Onto Old Bits & Pieces?

For the first time in a long time, we took our own advice. Before a recent move we decided to ditch all of our old tech, most of the corded keyboards and mice we had stashed in case of an emergency. It felt good. We were free of those boxes of junk and we were working towards a cleaner home office — or so we thought.

Upon arriving in our new space and setting things up, we had need for two additional wired keyboards and 2 mice. A mishap with one of our wireless units and the addition of a new CPU left us without. We had only saved one of each and spent the next few hours making a trip to Microcenter to pick up new ones. Sure they were only $4, but we still felt silly for ditching the ones we had, only to have to re-buy them a few weeks later.

It's a Murphy's Law thing and after having held onto them for years, it felt like the right thing to do, but was it really? How long do you hang onto your computer bits and pieces? Do you have different time lines for different pieces of gear? Let us know in the comments below!

Image: Flickr member JedSundwall licensed for use by Creative Commons

Comments (6)

When a technology is outdated I get rid of it (floppy disk old, not DVD drive old). I got rid of 90% of the power cords I had because I could never see myself needing that many. I keep an external enclosure for IDE and Sata drives in case something ever breaks and I need to do diagnostics. I also have a half dozen computer cases, but I mod them so that's more a hobby thing than anything else.

what does getting rid off mean? generating more ewaste :(

Pentium pro 200Mhz, still used today by my father to play card games. Both cathode screens gave out so that was the only thing we had to replace. Even the 14 year old Logitech ball mouse is still functioning and is in use. As is an HP 5l laser printer from the same year. And it's not because we couldn't afford new ones, it's because I can't justify throwing away pounds and pounds of plastic out the door. And also because, if you use the toner frugally, you'll still be printing out pages at 300dpi, just like with an old printer.

I'd get rid of almost everything but the newest hardware I have if it wasn't for the fact that I shudder to think where it will end up...

I give my stuff to Banco Informatico!
This amazing charity in Milan, Italy, refurbishes old computers and gives them free of charge to other charities and schools all over the world.

http://www.bancoinformatico.com/dotnetnuke/tabid/36/default.aspx

@susrith

Yes, I threw away the completely useless floppy drive. I don't have room to keep all that useless crap. I pay a garbage bill and wouldn't mind paying more to have my garbage sorted and recycled properly.

What do you do with your floppy drives? Make coasters out of them? How attractive.

Looking back, I can say that in my case it`s not how long I hang onto old bits and pieces, but how many of these I still keep. I just got rid of a box full of old 486 and Pentium I and II motherboards (a couple of each "flavor") which I stored "just in case" (I`m a sysadmin and computer technician). I left one of each kind, threw away the rest. Did the same with my twenty keyboards, plan to do it with add-on cards, peripherals and so on.

That said, there are old tech pieces I`ll hang onto for a long time, probably even longer than common sense can justify. For example, a 5.25 inch floppy drive is on my "never throw out" list - I haven`t used it for twelve years, but about half a year ago it saved someone`s butt, when it turned out that the only copy of old (and suddenly essential) data was on a bunch of big floppies and nobody had a drive to read them.

Bottom line: some of old tech pieces are worth hanging onto, but unless you have unlimited storage space - choose wisely :)