First post, by hwh
"HUGE SALE," read the sign.
DECADES of STUFF.
I had a chance to stop by on this country road to see what they had. Probably crap. Lots of cars, few people. I guess the cars were all theirs? Anyway, I sort of blocked half the driveway. Quite a bit of computer stuff, actually. This wasn't the first day of this sale, maybe not the second or third either. They had the standard stuff, clothes, children's toys, some old lawn chairs, random office things, bicycles.
So after looking it over I went over to the computer stuff. A random external V.90 modem was on a desk. There was a basket full of some kind of connectors in the original packaging. I don't even remember what it was. That is how uninteresting it was. I hovered near 3 or 4 computers. The guy called over "those are all free!" Oh...ah.
So what were they? Well my man. We had an HP of some kind. No cards, just a complete looking system. Some sort of memory, some sort of hard drive. Got to get to work.
There was a classic Dell and by classic I mean a black one. Probably XP/Vista. I wonder how exploded the capacitors were. I was tempted but I couldn't see anything interesting, couldn't open it up since I didn't know how, and yeah. The serial number tag was bleached. I could read the tag but not what OS it was.
Then there was a beige system. My general feeling on that is "take everything," but hear me out. This thing looked beat up. It had what I guess was a CD or DVD drive. And a 3.5" floppy. Type? No fucking clue, got to get to work. It didn't look that old. But with a parallel port and a floppy drive I guess it was like a P4 or some such. It was missing two drive bay doors, er, blanking plates. And there was tape over that (the hole in front). WTF. The back...sigh. The motherboard's port plate was missing. Seemed like a coating of dirt or dust inside. Light cobwebs. I mean, I've seen and heard of way worse, but it looked like something that needed work. Had the basic stuff, some CPU, some memory, some hard drive. No cards at all to speak of.
So, anyway, I was bored and stressed. Got to get to work. I could take them, but WHY? So I can have some junk projects I lack the skill to even bring to fruition? Maybe I should have taken the Dell. But then again, MEH. Cramming my apartment with yet another junk computer. It felt sacrilegious or arrogant to leave good parts, perhaps to the trash. But man, these systems were beat, nothing special, just...not even that nice. I don't care for or need high end, special systems with rare cards. What I actually really want is clean, original, working stuff. And this stuff was not that clean and beat up. And I didn't want the task/responsibility of taking the systems for some parts and dealing with the rest.
Feast and famine is how it goes. And this, this is the famine.