My system decided to turn the newest bits into 'trash'.....a new PCI-USB card decided to lose the little white bit in the USB female....and spike and kill the system requiring a hard reset....

On its way out it took with it the USB HD TV Tuner that I'd had for about a week.

I'm not impressed.

My wife and I had significant "discussions" on my keeping the Apple ][c while preparing to move.  I won because I could prove that it worked.    (I also got to enjoy playing MS Flight Simulator)

You owe me a new pair of eyes, Zubaz.

Ah, MS Flight Simulator... The proof that even Apples are IBM compatible

BTW, I have 4 gigs of ram in my new machine and... the disturbing thing is, I have more than that in my box-o-ram. I have a 1GB DDR2 stick three 512MB DDR2 sticks, two 256MB DDR1 sticks, eight 128MB sticks of varying generations and, half a dozen 32s and 16s. About 80% of what I listed doesn't work. About 40% of those are obviously disfucntional, being cracked, melted or whatever. OK, I think it's time I go get rid of my stuff. And it's fitting, too, since tomorrow it's the Three Wise Men... I'll go present gifts to the trash bin

It's only got 5 1/4"s. 

Also, what the hell, I can't seem to 1) find anything stating that a 13" ever existed, or 2) find my 13".  (Not that I'm terribly worried about the latter; I know it's in a box somewhere, I just haven't seen the box in a year or three.  Nor have I looked that hard today.)

WHO PURGED MY FLOPPY FROM THE UNIVERSE?!

I think everyone has this problem. My dad threw out the first computer he bought the other day, and I had to stop him from trying to salvage a 2 GB hard drive. "This cost me £180". We did get some handy drive bay screws out of it though. "Should I keep a floppy drive? What if my other floppy drives break and no-one sells them anymore?", "It's true, you might never be able to use your Windows 95 emergeancy boot disk again!"

486 dx2 66, the height of technology for a little while.

Of course I can't really talk - there's still a Commodore 64 with a broken power brick in my wardrobe.

LOL.....getting a great chuckle reading through this. Through the years, I have purged much of my old puters and parts. Actually sold my IBM 486 *pause...think....*yeah, had to be the 486....for $25 buck, cause he wanted something to dink around with. I do still have my 8 year old Gateway, but I don't know why. It crashed hard, and I am unable to get into it. Some day, though, I may be able to clean it up, and let the kids bang away at it, as it has XP on it. We'll see.....LOL

I am envious of all you people who had 486s and Commodores and... earlier stuff... I'm such a late bloomer 

Oh noes!!  I make key chain fobs otta my old ram modules, great conversation pieces for people that have know idea what they are. ID, your not throwing that anti-static bag away are you? 

It wasn't my stuff, but I just cleaned out the basement storage area at work. I don't know enough about old electronics to tell you exactly what that crap was, but I know it was obsolete in the 70s and some jackass kept it when we changed buildings 12 years ago. Piles of 5 1/4 floppies, stand-alone drives for them, cables for things no one remembers, a section of cabinets badly burned in an explosion 10 years ago (sadly, that's not a joke), a gas chromatograph that's too radioactive to throw away but too expensive to dispose of properly, records of faculty searches from 20 years ago, and more.

To give some perspective, we have chemicals from the 40s and glassware from the 1890s that people just won't let us throw away. Unfortunately, the state "ethics" rules (lol Illinois) won't let us sell the stuff on eBay, where it's worth quite a bit.

If you want to get rid of it, all you need to do is write down an address. And security systems installed. Night watchman routes, existence of watchdogs, camera coverage, that kind of thing. I promise you a fair cut relative to your involvement and risk.

Oddly enough, I did dispose of some of it by giving to some random Columbians.

Exchange grad students and a professor from the University of Columbia, to be exact. It's obsolete to us, but will save them thousands of dollars. Some of it can't be found on the market any more, so they were extremely grateful.

I have a box of computer parts, though they are current and not obsolete.

I have a couple of boxes of old parts, I used to have my old 3.1 IBM compat somewhere before I moved, now I just have the last 3 iterations of my gaming computers.  I should rebuild my AMD s939 system when I get my new graphics card and find out what really when wrong with it.