"most of these don't even work" - thats a key point

having said that i 'd guess that over the next 5 years you will encounter some problem or think of something you'd like to do that would have been answered by something in that collection - but its difficult to guess at which pieces in that pile would be of real use

indeed you must weigh up the positives of keeping it with the negatives of storing it all , space mainly

I have been working for a while on narrowing things down. I have eliminated all the CRT monitors, and and all of the socket 7 stuff.
Sometimes I think, maybe I should have not got rid of that. Then I think, what would I really being doing with it.
Cheap thought - maybe there's a difference between obsolete stuff harder to keep running, and obsolete stuff easier to keep running (or not worth it to keep running, and worth it to keep running.)
Case in point - the last systems to go will be the asus CUBX; those will go as as long as I can make them go. The p3-B with a slot 1 processor, not so much. Never liked slot 1, and in retrospect it was pretty short-lived.

ncmark wrote on 2023-10-04, 15:53:

I have been working for a while on narrowing things down. I have eliminated all the CRT monitors, and and all of the socket 7 s […]
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I have been working for a while on narrowing things down. I have eliminated all the CRT monitors, and and all of the socket 7 stuff.
Sometimes I think, maybe I should have not got rid of that. Then I think, what would I really being doing with it.
Cheap thought - maybe there's a difference between obsolete stuff harder to keep running, and obsolete stuff easier to keep running (or not worth it to keep running, and worth it to keep running.)
Case in point - the last systems to go will be the asus CUBX; those will go as as long as I can make them go. The p3-B with a slot 1 processor, not so much. Never liked slot 1, and in retrospect it was pretty short-lived.

i did the same with CRTs and don't regret it

i guess the question of valuing an item depending on how difficult it is to keep going is going to further depend on how much you like it (and like the work it takes to keep it going)

a bit of a shame this topic didnt take off as we dont talk about what we let go as much as what we get - understandable but the decisions that go into letting go of stuff are interesting in my view

Oh my god how many P4 motherboards have I just tossed in the bin. Minust battery holders and bios chips. Well also some AMD motherboards from that era of no ISA, bad cappacitors and uneffective high power draw CPUs. So all pre Core2/Atom.

I know what you mean by liberating.
With the recent move from the UK to Australia I was forced to be bit ruthless. Some of the more interesting things I got rid of.
Couple of Wyse and HP thin clients I saved from work for Win98 or virtual midi device projects that really I would never start.

Hardware that I had purchased with my own money but never/rarely used included
Bunch of Zalman and Thermalright heatsinks for older hardware when I had plans of silent builds including a Thermalright Spitfire which sold for £77!
Yamaha MU10

Everything was put on ebay with a £1 start bid, was interesting to see how much things were in demand and what wasn't. and not always the way I thought it would be.

I was most upset about loosing was the Compaq Prolient 1600. I spent a fair bit upgrading it but it no longer powered on and cost of shipping something that big and heavy plus troubleshooting (M/B and PSU had already been swapped) I knew it was time to keep a few parts and give away the rest

Terribly sorry for the late reply, I was busy hauling all this to recycling. 😁 I also added like 20 keyboards, a few monitors and a ton of cables to the pile so it was a long day.
The worst thing about this? I barely put a dent in my "collection" and I'm nearing a point when I want to try other hobbies without abandoning the retro scene completely. I have too much hardware but letting go is more difficult than I imagined and I'm trying to understand why.
I know I should just sell things but I keep thinking that I might need them later even though third of it is low level trash. Why the hell would I need 30 P4 boards, half of them OEM? Or a gazillion DDR2 sticks, budget video cards, optical drives, power cables, fans? Different boxes full of SATA cables, IDE cables, serial cables, you got the idea. And so many useless office OEM rigs! Why can't I let go?
It stems from the fact that having variety is nice when I want to do a custom build. If something doesn't work right then I have an immediate replacement. Incompatible card? Let's try the next one! Floppy not reading disks? No problem, I have 15 more to try. Board is picky with RAM? I'll just use a different stick from the box or a different board. It's so annoying when you are in the middle of a project and you don't have all the necessary parts so you make sure you have... everything. I'd say it's a rabbit hole but it's not, it's a bear cave.
And now here I am, trying to trim it all down to sane levels... somehow. I envy you guys who can do it relatively easily.

Some things are pretty easy to get rid of since the support of them has vanished.

dialup modems, adsl modems, analog tv cards would be a start.

I still have a few computer CRTs, but the day they break is the day they get thrown out. I'm not going to waste time fixing them. Still have a perfectly working CRT TV, but the same comment applies to it too.

Capcholo wrote on 2023-10-11, 08:34:

I know I should just sell things but I keep thinking that I might need them later even though third of it is low level trash. Why the hell would I need 30 P4 boards, half of them OEM? Or a gazillion DDR2 sticks, budget video cards, optical drives, power cables, fans? Different boxes full of SATA cables, IDE cables, serial cables, you got the idea. And so many useless office OEM rigs! Why can't I let go?
It stems from the fact that having variety is nice when I want to do a custom build. If something doesn't work right then I have an immediate replacement. Incompatible card? Let's try the next one! Floppy not reading disks? No problem, I have 15 more to try. Board is picky with RAM? I'll just use a different stick from the box or a different board. It's so annoying when you are in the middle of a project and you don't have all the necessary parts so you make sure you have... everything.

somehow this sounds good though! The ability to quickly find replacements for broken things and so on - at least if the moment something breaks and gets replaced you let it go then slowly things will empty out (very slowly!)

its why i tend to hang on to things too, for me its the amount of full PCs that takes up space, those mini towers all over - so maybe i should lose some of them and better organise all the parts

Robbbert wrote on 2023-10-11, 09:04:

Some things are pretty easy to get rid of since the support of them has vanished.

dialup modems, adsl modems, analog tv cards would be a start.

I still have a few computer CRTs, but they day they break is the day they get thrown out. I'm not going to waste time fixing them. Still have a perfectly working CRT TV, but the same comment applies to it too.

yes that's true, lots of cards just have no use now - at least not for me

a slow way to reduce total quantity is to let things go when they break, its slow because of the sometimes amazing resilience of electronics but it works - provided you don't get more stuff in the meantime!

overall for me though its the fact that i can do almost anything from early DOS to current on just a few computers - and really almost all of it on one if i'm willing to use dosbox, pcem, virtualisation, gog and various game hacks and mods etc

gerry wrote on 2023-09-28, 13:19:

"most of these don't even work" - thats a key point

having said that i 'd guess that over the next 5 years you will encounter some problem or think of something you'd like to do that would have been answered by something in that collection - but its difficult to guess at which pieces in that pile would be of real use

indeed you must weigh up the positives of keeping it with the negatives of storing it all , space mainly

lel, its definitely good to clear stuff out I agree. Luckily I kept the slot 1 6BTA3 which is now my main retro board with SBlink. I've even thrown away crt's i've listed but no one wanted that were faulty. had to dump them apple crt 21" i had for nearly a decade and a sony 420gs which failed on me so out it went to the recycling centre.

I mostly threw out some old consoles that either failed (PS3) or my OG Xboxes that got destroyed by a mouse infestation and some old Amps that were impossible to fix and some old laptops.
Luckily most of my retro pc hardware that I I felt I didn't need I either sold or gave away to stop it going to E-Waste (including some non working pcbs) ,
I recently sold a stack of miscellaneous network cards and AGP GPUs and I'm planning on selling most of my spare ram.
I had a pretty reasonable collection of retro consoles but managed to sell them off too.

I'm also in the process of clearing out some stuff maybe throwing away a junk motherboard or two and I've also got a dead genius mouse that cant be saved (I'm pretty sure the controller chip is buggered) and a dead keyboard so off they go.
Another problem is hard drives , I've got a bunch of faulty ones and once they fail you cant repair em , which sucks since it'll be a whole bunch of ewaste.
Also I've got a few dodgy old bad brand psus , some with leaking caps probably should get rid of em.

The two biggest things I cant bring myself to throw out is a sound blaster CT1740 which I fried by accident while probing it with a multi meter and a voodoo 1 maxi gamer that I bought not working and tried to fix by adding back missing capacitors , bending back legs and then finally getting to the stage of soldering down the legs that had been lifted , but since I didn't have a hot air gun at the time I bridged the legs with solder and made them break off , proceeded trying to file down the chip to expose the inside outputs , install bodge wires and in the end made a giant massacre of the card.

I guess I still feel guilty about ruining both cards and maybe I should let go of them , but I justify keeping them as spares for my other sb16 and voodoo 1.
And I almost forgot the duplicate MS 5148 mobo i own and the spare IO DATA virge card thats faulty.
oh and the spare slot 1 I have with bad caps which was the mobo i used when probing the CT1740 , no idea if it took a hit along with the card , id have to test it.

So I've mostly got an issue with throwing away faulty or damaged "spares" I guess , luckily its not a huge amount of stuff.

But I agree its nice downsizing old scrap , man it feels like a weight off your shoulders.