First post, by SavantStrike
After having found this site, I have to say I've been taken on a nice trip down memory lane. Along with the good come a few pangs of sadness for dead or forgotten hardware. So what have you parted with or lost that you wish you could get back. For me the most painful stuff are the parts I had to get rid of over the years due to space constraints.
For me:
1. My first PC. My parents bought a Pentium 100 (we were late adopters, a lot of my friends parents had 486 and even 386 boxes). The mobo was dead and at the time and I figured what would I possibly want to buy an AT board for?
2. My Intergraph Intense 3D voodoo Rush. My first 3d accelerator. It died, I wish I had at least kept it to mount on the wall.
3. A Voodoo3 PCI and a Voodoo3 AGP card. I tossed both of them at two different times when they were in old boxes I was gutting from friends. Man that was so stupid of me. I'll never be that inconsiderate to my fellow enthusiasts again.
4. A Voodoo2 PCI from Creative I got from a dumpster dive. I think it might have been an 8MB, but can't say for sure. I threw my hands up in the air in frustration trying to get it to work right. Silly me, I ended up buying a few V2's years later. At least this one might not have worked right. Judging from the system lock ups under two fresh installs of Windows ME, I would say that's the case.
5. Ati Mach 64 2mb PCI and A 2MB PCI Matrox card. I don't need them right now, but having read on here, I now realize they would have had a home for some of the folks here. Especially that Matrox card. That thing could go toe to to with my Geforce3 at the time 2d wise.
6. Upgradeware socket 423 to 478 adapter. All I can say is wow, that was dumb. They're pretty rare. Then again, I figured I'd never be dropping another Northwood in a socket 423 motherboard since the 423 board I had just died and no one had a 423 board in the first place.
7. Abit VT6X4 motherboard. Jumperless, slot 1, Apollo pro 133A. Need I say more? Oh, it was also the first motherboard I used in a ground-up PC build.
8. Gainward Geforce 4 TI 4600. I should have kept it as a wall hanger. I swear the GF4 TI cards had some mortality issues.
9. EVGA Geforce 256 DDR. My first AGP graphics card.
Looking at this list now, the regrets are pretty much every computer I've ever had dead parts in, or every part I've ever dumpster dived. Maybe this is why I did drastic things like throw out two V3 cards. Otherwise, I'd have ended up with more boxes than space (and I've already got a problem with parts drawers that are over full). It seems some here have simply ignored that inconvenience and embraced the fact that they cannot get rid of a single part without a twinge of remorse. Still, I apologize for having tossed them so hastily. Next time if it's at all worthwhile to anyone, I'll see if maybe someone would take it on a one cent +shipping Ebay auction or something so my conscience is clean when I take it to the curb.
These days I do resort to drastic measures to resurrect even the most mundane of hardware. Re-soldering damaged capacitors, trying to flash bioses, etc.
