Disposing of old electronics

Beer Baron wrote: I find it hard to believe there'd be much market for "retro" gaming rigs to play late 90's/early 00's games. I can still play those on my modern rig running Windows 10. I've got Fallout installed and just found a source for old Ultima games.

^^ It depends. Win95/98 stuff barely runs, or doesn't run at all on modern computers & OSes, and it's still nearly impossible to emulate well. Some people don't like the source ports and insist on running stuff on "real hardware." Things like Half Life 1, Unreal 1, the first few Need for Speed games, Quake 2 & 3 etc. still have a big following. For me that was the height of the LAN party era & I can totally understand people wanting to keep a creaky vintage machine running to play those, and replacement parts for them are getting IMPOSSIBLE to find.

XP-era hardware is a lot less popular because they figured out a lot of the speed scaling & backwards compatibility issues with the games, so most of them run fine on anything. E.g. you can get Half Life 2 or Portal 2 on Steam for more platforms now than they were originally released on. Unfortunately that coincides with the P4/Athlon XP/early Core2 so the market for those is really gone, you may be out of luck trying to move those.

I do think some demand will pick back up in the future when 32-bit apps become impossible to run, but maybe the whole 'retro gaming' thing will be over by then.

FWIW my only Windows gaming machine is a P4/3.0 with DDR2 & hyperthreading, and it runs XP. :P But I usually play DOS stuff or Steam/Humble/indie games on my Mac.

I still get mad about people deliberately destroying working stuff though. I have a sequencing rig in my music studio that I use every day, which can't handle drives over 32GB - it's a BIOS limitation. I've only got one spare for it so if they both go I'm gonna be in for the long hunt. Meanwhile people on here are going on about shooting them or drilling holes in them, etc. Rageface.

I had a guy try to buy some WORKING 386 motherboards off me because he wanted to embed the CPUs in resin and make a f**king coffee table out of them - I just about chewed his ear off. I realize not everyone's into preserving old hardware but don't be deliberately obtuse that way.

It's exactly analogous to all the pedestrian sedans from the '60s that no one thought would ever be wanted and got trashed by the boatloads, & now they get bidding wars over them.

Security is not about making your stuff impenetrable; it is about making your stuff secure enough that your neighbor with an unsecured WiFi named "Linksys" is a more attractive target.

Unless you honestly think you're going to be the target of State-sponsored espionage (you're not), rendering the HDD inoperable with a drill and/or hammer is more than sufficient. Anyone looking to steal personal info is not going to bother with your damaged HDD versus finding an intact one and using that.

Jay wrote: I had a guy try to buy some WORKING 386 motherboards off me because he wanted to embed the CPUs in resin and make a f**king coffee table out of them - I just about chewed his ear off. I realize not everyone's into preserving old hardware but don't be deliberately obtuse that way.

I wouldn't be too hard on someone for that. Making art from something is a legitimate use. He just might do better to be educated that there is equipment that is less rare/precious.

I guess my memory of major shifts in hardware/software is off. I figured 98 era stuff was where the architecture shift came in, not with 2000/ME/XP. I remember 95 being when computers still ran a true version of DOS, and 98 when it was just emulated.

Granted, I loaded Fallout 2 recently and noticed, "This game is old enough to have voted in the election." But to me the real retro games are the DOS based ones. I think of the modern era of video games starting around '98 with games like Diablo, Half Life, Deus Ex, Baldur's Gate, etc. I've had less trouble getting Fallout 2 to run on a 64-bit system than Fallout 3.

Stefan wrote: Goodwill will also take electronics and either resell them or electronically scrap/recycle them. Destroy the hard drives yourself (unless you know there's no data you care about on them). Take the tax write-off for next year and help to declutter your life.

Tax write-off?

stroker wrote:

Stefan wrote: Goodwill will also take electronics and either resell them or electronically scrap/recycle them. Destroy the hard drives yourself (unless you know there's no data you care about on them). Take the tax write-off for next year and help to declutter your life.

Tax write-off?

Donations to nonprofit organizations are a tax write-off, assuming you itemize deductions.

Sky_Render wrote: Security is not about making your stuff impenetrable; it is about making your stuff secure enough that your neighbor with an unsecured WiFi named "Linksys" is a more attractive target.

Yeah, the people with the knowledge/skill to break into my stuff are either going to aim for juicier, higher value targets. Or they're going to go for easier targets that are just as valuable.

All I want to avoid is just putting information out there in an easy format that would be just begging for someone to take it and execute identity theft (tax returns, resumes, etc.). I can imagine a low-level identity thief trolling Good Will or dumpster diving behind Best Buy for hard drives with personal info.