I am an unrepentant hoarder of both treasures and trash fit for a thrift store, that’s why I find it hard to throw away anything. Even the things that hasn’t been used for years is a struggle for me to throw even it has already gathered dust in the loft and is generally deemed to be totally worthless.
I am an owner of five PCs, four of which are archaic. There are four redundant machines which is here with me although my current desktop serves me well enough. The oldest computer with me still relies on MS-DOS while the newest one still has Windows Me installed on it.
I still find it difficult to throw them away despite the fact that these machines have any intrinsic worth. I resolved to design a list of cool stuff I could do with my old machines, if for no other reason than to have a ream of decent excuses prepared for the next time it came to moving house and having to explain why those “damn pieces of junk” still inhabited our attic.
Excuse 1: Keeping it for Retro Gaming
I have discovered that old PCs are useful for retro gaming. Handling “World of Warcraft” might be excellent for the modern machine but if you give it an old copy of “Sam & Max Hit the Road”, it can’t cope. Unless you can find a decent emulator, the drivers will probably be smarter to deal with the games of the old, which is not always that easy, then classic games can be lost to the modern gamer. The old DOS that I have is something that I can rely on without any danger of the machine of not being able to cope to shoot aliens and hellspawn in “Doom 2”.
Excuse 2: Experimenting with New Music.
This youtube clip proves that sometimes, no amount of RAID data recovery will help a tired and busted machine. Your heavy doorstop can make the most out of it by creating a new wave of innovative music like the “Star Wars Imperial March”.
Excuse 3: To Boldy Go and Find Martians
I’m pretty sure that anyone of my generation has some point in their childhood that secretly wished to climb abroad the USS Enterprise and help Patrick Stewart “explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations”.
That can be made into a reality with the help of your old PC and a good internet connection. The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) was originally founded by the US govenment that it now relies on the private sources to search for alien E.T. and friends. SETI also uses CPUs connected online to make calculations and process huge amounts of data. You can volunteer your old PC to help in the struggle to find aliens.
Excuse 4: Getting Gran Surfing on that InterWebThingamy
Old people love the internet. Silver surfers are among the fastest growing demographic online. The number of over-55s using Facebook had grown by 513 per cent from January to June 2009, as reported last year by iStrategyLabs. It’s a good thing about the grandparents that they do not need to have a bucket full of RAM or multi-core processors to get them online. So rather ditching my old PC, I would rather donate one to my grandmother.
Excuse 5: Help the Homeless Fish
With tremendous CT monitors, it’s difficult to believe that we used up all the desk space. I still have three flat screens mostly made CRTs stuck in massive boxes upstairs somewhere. I thought they would be totally pointless until I stumbled across this innovation make your CRT into an aquarium.
Now I need never worry about having to throw away an old PC ever again!