IMO OEM machines should be left alone. They usually work very well, just put in a Sound Card and off you go.

Agreed as horrible as proprietary parts are, the big brands usually test their systems to hell and back making them incredibly reliable base to build up from.
A well thought out design I think its a shame to gut. But there have been some truly terrible designs that I show no love when stripping. I hate the idea of throwing anything out that still functioning but pulling the good parts and sacrificing say a old motherboard with a budget chipset, few low capacity sticks of RAM and average PSU so the other parts can live on in other PC's balances out in my book

That's essentially what I do with these when they end up in my todo pile. I strip the usable parts, screws, slot covers, etc. These machines were all budget chipset, integrated everything pci-only machines. The Compaq had a s370 Celeron 600 in it, another Gateway had a s478 Celeron. This other Dell Dimension something or other had a random low-clocked early P4, etc. The most interesting thing was the Compaq and the Gateway had IMMACULATE white colored drives and drive blanks that can be reused in my other machines to fill holes...literally. I take pictures of the Windows keys when they are intact for reuse later if I can.

If these had been decently upgradeable machines, I'd have kept them as is. The cases can't be reused because of the proprietary nature of some of the connectors, the PSUs are trash and low powered. The only interesting part I pulled out of anything was a Geforce4 MX 420 PCI out of the Dell.

OEM machines from the pre-pentium era were for the most part built like tanks and awesome, albiet super proprietary, but they could always be used as the basis of decent gaming rigs. By the p3/p4 era, nope. Commoditized crap is all you'll find for anything but the most high-end contemporary systems.

The only thing that got me all emotional was that these machines were in perfect shape and in working condition, as good as they were brand new. Whoever had these took extremely good care of them. No sun-fading, etc. Knowing that they could have once belonged to someone who was happy to own them just made me feel like a dick for being the guy to finally kill a perfectly good, if totally obsolete machine.

There are millions of tons of electronics destroyed every year. Do not feel guilt. It serves no purpose. 😀

Would anyone believe me if I said that I have never torn down/scrapped/salvaged an OEM desktop or tower? Never, ever, ever? And no, it wasn't by choice; I simply never got an OEM build for gutting purposes. All were generic-build mid or mini towers - no generic desktops either.

As far as guilt feelings, I simply do not get any; just about all of the generic builds I got to scrap/salvage were in very bad condition to begin with. Some didn't work at all, others were just too dirty and worn out from years of use; a small fraction were already half-gutted and I simply finished the job. I usually took hard drives, CPUs, memory sticks and /or chips, video and sound cards, SCSI cards, screws, slot covers, cables, USB cards and brackets, floppy drives, anything that was worth having. I never took cases or power supplies - the cases were always too dirty, banged up and incomplete, the PSUs just burned out or worn out. What was left I took to local landfills and, later on, recycling centers.

I have about 8 gutted cases that I'll be taking down to the local dump as they have an e-waste recycling area there. Plus, if the employees aren't paying attention...never know what'll be there for the quick snatching...

I've gutted hundreds of machines.
I don't feel sorry because the machines I gutted, virtually all of them weren't in operational condition anyway (someone else already took the most important parts from the machines or the machine was damaged) and rebuilding a damaged or incomplete OEM machine seemed pointless to me as I could simply save myself the trouble by replacing them with some clone PC instead using interchangeable parts.
The couple OEM machines that did finally find their way to my house, I took apart as when they break down, it was impossible to repair them anyway and I don't like being dependable on a machine that I can't fix myself.

I totally agree that the old OEM systems were build like tanks, it was very hard to open them and they were very heavy (truly build like a tank) and as I did all of my dumpsterdiving by bike, it wasn't practical to bring those OEM machines home with me.

The older OEM systems were built like tanks, new ones seem kind of cheap and flimsy. When you receive gear you don't particularly care about you can either find a use for them, gut them for parts and recycle the rest, or trade them for something you do want if possible.

When I used to hit a local recycling center each Friday (now closed) I seen tons of somewhat interesting machines I could have snagged but didn't because I had one already or they didn't fit my current needs. OEMs made machines in the 100,000's or more so its not like you trashed the last one (at least not at this time). When you have a massive glut its easy to be picky, down the road you might regret not saving one. I wish I would have snagged a couple Gateway2000 full towers I seen at the recycling place that needed some work, oh well.

For the most part anything I trash hardware wise had it coming. My regrets are not snagging something that I started to want down the road as my collecting needs changed somewhat. Still I have so much equipment and a limited space that there is currently no usable room for anything else.

I'm pretty much pragmatic when collecting old hardware; I have no use for vintage machines that are non-upgradeable (like OEM machines) or otherwise don't suit my vintage gaming purpose (like 486s), no matter how great their collectible value is. It also goes for almost everything else, for example, vintage amplifiers/receivers that don't have separate amp/preamp mode, or vintage speakers that don't suit my taste (ie silk dome tweeters instead of titanium/beryllium domes). But, oh boy, I don't have the stomach to gut the stuff. I usually try to sell of give the hardware away to someone who may appreciate it or even love it. 🙁

However, considering in this board we have people who don't hesitate to cut off the top of their game boxes... 😁

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

I'm pretty much pragmatic when collecting old hardware; I have no use for vintage machines that are non-upgradeable (like OEM machines) or otherwise don't suit my vintage gaming purpose (like 486s), no matter how great their collectible value is. It also goes for almost everything else, for example, vintage amplifiers/receivers that don't have separate amp/preamp mode, or vintage speakers that don't suit my taste (ie silk dome tweeters instead of titanium/beryllium domes). But, oh boy, I don't have the stomach to gut the stuff. I usually try to sell of give the hardware away to someone who may appreciate it or even love it. 🙁

However, considering in this board we have people who don't hesitate to cut off the top of their game boxes... 😁

I don't really go scrapping for machines, most of the ones I end up with have been given to me or they are junkers they were throwing out at work.
I've got maybe 3 or 4 machines like this that are in storage but I haven't bothered to raid them for parts. I'd try and sell them but some of them I doubt I could give away. 2 of them are early P II class systems and the other 2 are late era P III systems. In an era of multicore, multi gigabyte machines no one wants these (accept people like us).

Who the heck is cutting boxes apart? I'm not sure I see the rationale behind that. If they are mounting them behind glass or something, you could just as easily do a high resolution scan and color printout and then sell the game after backing it up (rather than destroy the box if you don't want the clutter). Technically you don't own the game any more but I doubt the Gestapo is going to come after you for keeping a copy of a 20 or 30 year old game you sold.