Brought to you by the department of the environment

[pbray]

Newsflash-- it is now possible to walk in a straight line from the door of the writing room to the computer desk. Also there was a carpet under all that junk, whose color is now confirmed to be brown.

In potentially related news, three past projects were filed away, and the drafts for the ur-bar project were consigned to recycling.

Next step is to deal with the graveyard of dead/outdated tech--monitor, printer, desktop and laptop. Perhaps a joint funeral service followed by eco-friendly disposal of the corpses?

Comments

[karen-w-newton.livejournal.com]

Our county has a recycling program for old PCs and similar equipment. You have to take it to the center yourself, though, which is why I have a stack of it in my basement. -)

[pbray.livejournal.com]

My company has a free annual recycle day in May, otherwise you have to deal with the town which is a pain for both hours and location. But I found out this summer that Best Buy will recycle most electronics-- they charge $10 for certain items, but then immediately give you a $10 gift card so it's a wash.

The hard part will be scrubbing the old hard drives. I think the desktop may be Windows 95, while the laptop is 98SE vintage.

[karen-w-newton.livejournal.com]

Maybe you could just get a big electromagnet? That's what I was thinking of doing. And one of my PCs is so old it doesn't have a hard drive!

[mtlawson.livejournal.com]

I usually wait for Staples to have a "bring your old tech in" day, which is when I clean out the basement of the old stuff.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I just pulled out the hard drives. Now, of course, I have them in a box in the basement, but they take up less space than the boxes from which they were pulled.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I also read somewhere that you can just drill a hole in it.

[mtlawson.livejournal.com]

Magnets are good. There's also freeware out there that goes through all the "open" sections of drives and replaces it with "0101" combinations.

When I give away my original Athlon, I'm doing that.

[karen-w-newton.livejournal.com]

Wow, I never even heard of Athlon. Our old dual-floppy machine was a Kaypro.

[jmward14.livejournal.com]

I feel your pain. We're repairing the drywall in the living/dining room and repainting this week, and we've packed nearly forty boxes of books and breakables with about 12-20 more to go. And when it's all done we get to unpack. Oy! Even our laid-back cat is stressed.

[mtlawson.livejournal.com]

An Athlon? The AMD chip that was the compeitior to the Intel Pentium III?

Computer makers started using the Athlon chipset back in 1999.

[karen-w-newton.livejournal.com]

Why does it sound so strange to say "Back in 1999"? I must be getting really old. Sounds like a year or two ago,

[mtlawson.livejournal.com]

It was, but when I was typing it up I realized it was 11 years ago.

Eeek.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

That's likely how I will wind up.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Therapeutic sledgehammer.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Yikes! Nothing like packing and unpacking to add stress.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I feel that way about my chainsaw...

[pbray.livejournal.com]

I may do freeware on the machine that can run it. On the older one I'll likely just smash it.