Some time ago I donated a huge box of FDD 3.5 and 5.25, it was about 200 pieces, maybe more. There were still individual CDs, I donated hardware that was just stay around (not using it). I don't understand the reason why you need to collect something if you don't use it. Clutter in the apartment is created by piling up things, and this should be fixed. Especially - gave to specific people who actively used or gave to others

I mean it's common sense but it all depends on how much you value your time. Let's say you have a complete build you no longer need, is it better to sell the whole thing for 100 euros, or strip it apart and sell the different parts for 200 euros? Knowing that doing the latter might take you not twice the time but maybe eight times longer. Only you can decide 🤷

Having been through several decluttering cycles, the main personal advice I can give is to not get rid of the important items that you've had since childhood because you'll regret it down the road 🤷

First, you have to stop caring about PCs as much. If you're in the hoarding mode, it's almost impossible to get rid off anything. And then, you have to stay in the standby mode as long as possible, which means don't watch any retro PC related videos on Youtube 😁.

I always try to get rid off things which I don't use but I have to really be sure. If something is in the box for a year or more, it's a good candidate to say good bye to. It's not always as easy - I have three AWE32s in a box (CT2760, CT3980 and CT3990) without actually using them. But I know if I sell those cards I won't find them anymore easily for a good price (not that they were cheap but they were not expensive either). And if I sell them they will probably end up in another hoarder's box 😁. But I know I have to let them go eventually because in reality, I don't like Creative cards and will probably never use them.

My most important suggestion is - write on paper which builds are important to you and be specific about the configuration. Make those builds, maybe keep some spare parts here and there, and sell everything else. Don't buy anything you won't use in your build!

I got married

It’s NOT hoarding if it’s someone else’s Electrical JUNK.
No one wants this old Stuff.
Ewaste.

The last time I went through an acquiring phase was a few years ago - all that early 2007-2013 stuff was so cheap....

I do feel that i now have enough and my pattern of usage has changed over the last 5 or so years anyway

I don't really use 32 bit systems any more - a 64 bit system with win 7 and moderate/budget card can handle everything up to near mid 2010's anyway (if not too insistent on maxed graphics in later games) via a mix of gog, patches, dosbox, emulation/virtualisation (hardly needed). The better of those machines are also good for linux and online

The experience of the game is made available in almost all cases without need for a machine from the game's era

I still have lots of machines and components, more than enough i suspect even if they prove less than averagely reliable. I still occasionally use an older machine for fun, old software and other specific uses, just lots less than i used to

I still enjoy the whole scene, but i really think i've stopped with buying vintage pc things now.

I wont deliberately purge things though, that's only necessary if running out of room - its surprising how little room well ordered and stacked PCs and components can take! Also, my collection is low value - middling and budget everything and nothing really rare, so there isnt really any monetary incentive to sell either

I had legit hoarder parents.

The best defense I have to offer, is this:

Which of these thoughts occurs when you see the item(s)?

1) I regularly use this, and have fun doing it!

2) I might use that someday, even if it's not today!

3) No, that's still good! Dont throw it away!

1) is healthy retro hobbyism.
2) is entry to hoarding.
3) is straight up hoarding.

The goal should be maximizing your own enjoyment of an activity. Not diluting that enjoyment through approptiation of things you dont or will very seldom use.

Quality over quantity, with quality defined by honest exploration of what actually adds value to YOUR life.

These Retro Computers were designed for EASY repair and upgrade.
Resilient, Enduring, Dependable.

If People don’t collect it and Repair it NoOne will ever see it again except in books and videos.
But what about Touch and Feel.
What did it actually feel like to use these old computers.

I went through all of this ~20 years ago, because my collection/my property had felt like a burden to me.
After I had down-sized the collection almost down to zero, I had felt a relief for a moment. Then emptyness had followed.
I restarted my collection again, but focused on a tidy storage.
I don’t have many PCs or consoles anymore, but collected replacement parts for the computing era I like (say 386 motherboards, ISA cards, drives) and stored them in cardboard boxes.
When it comes to media (books, game carts, CDs, floppies), I don’t focus on "hording" but I do aim for building a small library, rather.
Personally, I think that a tidy storage helps to have peace of mind.

Family Computers.

These computers were designed to be a family computer
ONE per household.

A time when houses had

ONE family phone
ONE family car
ONE family TV
ONE family stereo
ONE family room
ONE "Single family house" as we call them in America.

Today everyone has their own.

ONE family TV

Among the first things my dad had done when I got my NES:
He moved it up into my bedroom, next to a Commodore video monitor.
So the ONE family TV in livingroom wasn't being occupied by me playing SMB.
(The NES originally was hooked up to our VCR via AV ports. The VCR served as the tuner to the fully analogue TV.)

Edit: I forgot to mention, my dad didn't buy a monitor especially for me.
It already was there, but unused, collecting dust in the attic. So I could have it.
Like the top-loading VHS player I had watched tapes on (via old 9" green monitor): I fondly remember watching this now forgotten TV series at the time.
My first real TV was a black/white portable TV with radio, also from the attic.
Then I got a Casio (or Roadstar) pocket TV with a colour LCD screen. Sci-fi at the time!

I recently moved from the UK back to Australia so was forced to have a massive clear out.
This about a rooms worth of stuff I had collected over the years working in IT

The end date depended on visa's etc but once we had made our minds up I started advertising future projects/ things I'd never get a chance to use.
Worked out that was about 12 months and got alot more ruthless about 3-6 months before moving. It still wasn't enough time

For low value items that were easy enough to post I'd put on eBay with a £1 start price. It was surprising what caused bidding wars and what had no interest. (e.g. Sealed copies of Win98 OEM and Office 2011 Mac was very popular)
Sometimes it would take a few rounds to sell so if it doesn't go first time don't stress.
Higher value items was much the same but with what I thought was a fair price, I wasn't doing this to get rich but some items I at least had a minimum value.
I'd value the item by checking how much a similar item had sold recently and typically list for a bit less in a bid style listing.

Bigger items I advertised on Gumtree and Facebook as collection only. In the end I still ran out of time but made a deal with 2 people.
I gave one guy took about 2 van loads of old hardware including complete computers (nothing fancy think S478 PC not yet upgraded for gaming) all for free.
Someone else scored all my 10 year old servers for £200 which included me delivering somewhat local. That was a very full Volvo station wagon's worth of enterprise hardware!

Thanks chinny22 ! I may be forced to move in 5-10 months and appreciate the info on how you did it and how it went. Hoping to keep a van full but have a garage full....

This may be of some help?
It's a list of most of the stuff I sold. We are looking around mid 2022 till mid 2023
Prices are the selling price + shipping

wierd_w wrote on 2025-05-06, 15:08:

1) I regularly use this, and have fun doing it! […]
Show full quote

1) I regularly use this, and have fun doing it!

2) I might use that someday, even if it's not today!

3) No, that's still good! Dont throw it away!

1) is healthy retro hobbyism.
2) is entry to hoarding.
3) is straight up hoarding.

I'm sometimes all 3! Having said that i never let it waste space i can use for other things, and if something fails and isn't readily fixed then i let it go too. It's all very cheap too.

#2 is fairly common for me, i do eventually use things - even if its taken a few years sometimes. #3 is also something for me, and i imagine there are things i own that I will never use in the end. There are also things i've thrown out that I realise i could use later on, its always difficult to judge. I think there is a long fuzzy boundary between hoarding as a detrimental condition and just 'collecting a lot'

chinny22 wrote on 2025-05-07, 01:22:

I recently moved from the UK back to Australia so was forced to have a massive clear out. This about a rooms worth of stuff I ha […]
Show full quote

I recently moved from the UK back to Australia so was forced to have a massive clear out.
This about a rooms worth of stuff I had collected over the years working in IT

The end date depended on visa's etc but once we had made our minds up I started advertising future projects/ things I'd never get a chance to use.
Worked out that was about 12 months and got alot more ruthless about 3-6 months before moving. It still wasn't enough time

For low value items that were easy enough to post I'd put on eBay with a £1 start price. It was surprising what caused bidding wars and what had no interest. (e.g. Sealed copies of Win98 OEM and Office 2011 Mac was very popular)
Sometimes it would take a few rounds to sell so if it doesn't go first time don't stress.
Higher value items was much the same but with what I thought was a fair price, I wasn't doing this to get rich but some items I at least had a minimum value.
I'd value the item by checking how much a similar item had sold recently and typically list for a bit less in a bid style listing.

Bigger items I advertised on Gumtree and Facebook as collection only. In the end I still ran out of time but made a deal with 2 people.
I gave one guy took about 2 van loads of old hardware including complete computers (nothing fancy think S478 PC not yet upgraded for gaming) all for free.
Someone else scored all my 10 year old servers for £200 which included me delivering somewhat local. That was a very full Volvo station wagon's worth of enterprise hardware!

that's interesting and suggests another side to the common "ebay sellers charge too much" complaint, in fact there are good prices - its just a question of timing and patience from the buyer perspective. Also, being even more patient the buyer can wait and see if there is a vanload like in your example.

A question though - did it feel like a loss when it all went? I mean in the sense that you'd have remembered each item as you got it through work or whatever? Some things in my collection are attached to memories, not very deep ones, but kind of like stories of how i got it and what tinkering was done - while some things i look at and there is almost no story with them.

Had to offload much too much when I moved from an (admittedly small) family home with shed and basement to a tiny Amsterdam apartment on the 3rd floor some 17 years ago. Basically everything I'd collected had to go, including a lot of things I might give my right arm or at least a kidney for now (fully working and pristine NeXTstation, a maxed-out SGI Indigo2 to name but a few, as well as a collection of motherboards with basically every So5/So7 chipset and video cards with pretty much every chip from 1995-2000, including nV1, Voodoo5 PCI etc). In the end about the only vintage stuff that moved with me were things I actively used, i.e. some keyboards and a Sony w900 24" CRT monitor. Ironically after a year or two I ended up swapping the w900 for a 2.5" HDD as well due to space constraints and purchase of a decent large TFT monitor.

The timing for offloading it couldn't have been worse - 2008 was about the nadir for 'old junk' prices. Overall I got less than I'd spent on getting it all - particularly if you include travel costs, and that's saying something as in those days you could still buy boxes full of unsorted old PC stuff for next to nothing, which was my main means of getting hold of things. I donated the chipsets collections (motherboards and VGA) to a fellow Vogon (although neither of us were on here at the time). In the end I ended up having to dump some stuff at the local recycling center - although that was mainly scrap, damaged and defective parts.

Do I regret it? I regret the situation, but given the situation not what I had to do. At a certain point you just turn a switch in your mind and get on with it. Now I live in a larger home again and have built up a similar quantitiy of stuff, though with a different focus. Do I intend to ever having to offload it again in the same way? No way! But if the situation arises, I'm sure I will.

im in IT, so i collect based on my needs, not to store or display (i already have a box with special parts for that)

currently there is 13 active computers in my home (6 for lan party, 1 laptop for emulation, 1 retro pc, 1 netbook for hdd recovery and analisis, 1 pc for music in the kitchen and CCTV control, the file server, the main pc and the T60)

the spare parts in my house make a cicle during the years they stay in here

1st) in the front in use or as a replacement for a client
2nd) once they became old and less demanded, i move them to a less used space so from time to time i have easy acess
3rd) the majority of times if i see they stay in the same place for like a year or more, i strip them for parts, give away or recycle (there is no market for retro parts in Argentina, no one is interested)

so there is a constant move that allow me to renovate all the computers without actively trying to

having mention that, i still do my year clean up of the house to get rid of useless junk and maintain the clutter under control.

I'm feeling this pinch right now. Fortunately, most of my issue is no free time. I don't have an emotional attachment to most of my computer hardware. I'll just save the best and throw out the rest.