Mostly just loosing around $5,000 or so worth of modern (at the time) and vintage parts as well complete systems to arson. Only recently found another Thermaltake Xaser series case after almost two years of searching.

From time to time I regret getting rid of lots of things, but if I'd kept them I would not have had space to do other things I enjoyed. Particular regrets about things I gave away or chucked:

mac 5500
g3 imac
ibm intellistation with twin p3 933s
sgi o2
various motherboards, graphics and sound cards
1990s atx cases

Also regret selling stuff - probably everything I ever had but no longer do 🤣 .

I tossed a trash bag full of DOS era game boxes (kept the disks and manuals) around 2000 before I got into retro gaming. I sold a spare Radius 81/110 motherboard to a fellow collector that will be impossible to replace if mine dies.

Other then those, not really. Being a packrat that hasn't had to move in 40 years means I still have most of my stuff. The items I have sold off I never cared about anyway. Some items I could have gotten more money for, but that's another issue.

My family's second computer was a full-tower Micron Millennia P133 just like this one. It was a massive beast with all the trimmings - ATi Mach64 accelerator, 32MB of RAM, 17" Trinitron screen, etc. Fastest system on the block when we bought it in early 1995, but over the years it was upgraded beyond recognition with a new motherboard, video card, CPU, RAM, and CD-RW drive. Eventually it became unstable, probably because of bad caps on the crappy Tyan motherboard, and my father eventually left it out on the curb. I regret not convincing him to keep it, it was really an awesome system and I have great memories of playing Flight Unlimited and Nascar Racing on it.

I regret throwing out the following stuffs 10yrs ago! Ah....
1.) Gravis Ultrasound Max BNIB!
2,) Aztech wavegalaxy 32 with 3D addon
3,) Diamond Edge 3D

Years ago, I had a Gateway P100 Win95B system that I was keeping at my girlfriends house. Her basement flooded and the computer was submerged for at least 48 hours. After we cleaned out the basement, the computer was thrown away. At the time, I was under the mistaken belief that a waterlogged computer would never be good again.

A few years later, I had a chat with Chris over at BadCaps.net and he told me that computers are surprisingly resilient if they're thoroughly dried. In fact, he gave one of my KT7As a bath & scrub before recapping it. That KT7A is now one of my favorite PCs and it works flawlessly.

Nowadays, I kick myself in the ass when I think of that old Gateway P100. It was a really nice system that would probably have been OK if I had just rinsed it off and dried it out.

I also sold a boxed mint copy of "D" that I now regret. My brother tells me that it's somewhat collectible now.

I'm actually about to sell an item that I may regret later: a MS Explorer Trackball. I had two of these that I purchased back around 2005. While I love the way the body of it feels, I've always thought that the action of the ball itself was horrible. There were plastic lips on the "ball cup" that were supposed to hold the ball in place, but actually just increased drag on it. The metal bearings inside the cup were awful too and always gave me a "fingernails on chalkboard" sensation. I used one of the two trackballs for several years but had to modify it to get it functioning satisfactorily. I removed the plastic lips on the cup and frequently lubed the bearings with oil or hand lotion. It was tolerable that way. However, for an optical trackball it required just as much maintenance/cleaning as a regular old mechanical trackball.

Even though I removed the second trackball from its package, it is still essentially brand new. This is the one I'm thinking of selling since they're worth a few bucks on eBay. I'm just afraid I'll regret it later if I ever develop really serious RSI. Aside from the Logitech FX and the MS Explorer, there weren't any truly ergonomic trackballs ever made. Even the FX and Explorer aren't perfect and have their drawbacks. However, If I sell this thing and change my mind later, I will be S-O-L.

There are some things I regret buying:
Matrox Mystique (I quickly sold this POS and got a Millenium + Voodoo 1 instead.)
Gravis Xterminator Gamepad (They came so close to perfection, but it's just so terribly flawed.)
Radeon 9800XT (Twitchy drivers. Crap for Win9x.)
BattleCruiser 3000AD (Nothing else to say, really.)
GeForce 4 Ti4800SE (I got fooled by the "Ti4800" part of "Ti4800SE". The "SE" stands for "Shiat Edition".)

I regret throwing away an IBM 5150 that I paid $20 for at a yard sale. This was before I got internet and found out there was actually a collector's market for these things. 🙁

Somehow lost a Rendition Verite V1000 card. Not the most useful, but definitely interesting (and relatively rare).

It was a Intergraph Intense 3D 100 from memory.

I guess we remember the hardware more than the software - but I was recently also lamenting discarding MS Office v1.6 manuals and boxes (I sold the discs but that was no consolation) and recycling some old PC magazines. Seemed like a good idea at the time...

BuuBox wrote:

Somehow lost a Rendition Verite V1000 card. Not the most useful, but definitely interesting (and relatively rare).

It was a Intergraph Intense 3D 100 from memory.

That reminds me, I remember inexplicably losing a few Matrox cards a while ago. Can't remember what exactly they were - I think one might have been a Mystique 220 or similar - or what happened to them, and who knows, they might still be kicking around my house somewhere.

Sutekh94 wrote:

That reminds me, I remember inexplicably losing a few Matrox cards a while ago. Can't remember what exactly they were - I think one might have been a Mystique 220 or similar - or what happened to them, and who knows, they might still be kicking around my house somewhere.

Funnily enough, I think I lost the Rendition in a bunch of older PowerMac stuff I gave away (Beige G3 era) as I have a Matrox Millennium 4MB PCI card for Macs that I can't otherwise explain!

Almost forgot about it... I got an Atari 1040STE with mono SM124 monitor around 1998, condition unknown. It turned out it works OK with the monitor, but TV output didn't. But for games you needed TV out or a color monitor. I stored it in the attic. A few years later I just threw everything away 😲 Then around 2008 I got another Atari this time 1040STFM with the color monitor. If I only knew back than that I'll get the right monitor 😢

It's painful to think of the classic games boxes that I chucked.... System Shock, System Shock 2, Syndicate Plus, Syndicate Wars, No Remorse, No Regret, Fallout, Fallout 2, Blake Stone, Doom, Hexen, Magic Carpet Plus, Magic Carpet 2, Powermonger. Just... ugh.

I guess I'll chime in also. A couple things I really regret throwing away:

1) My first IBM PS/2 hand-me down computer in the early 90's that I learned DOS on. Even worse, when I gave it away I didn't back up my data so I lost everything. Thankfully though, I was smart enough to hold onto my 2nd computer from the later 90's and kept the original mouse, keyboard, and still have all the data backed up six ways from Sunday.

2) Big game boxes. In the 90's I had an obsession with downsizing to the disc and jewel case only. 😢

Unfortunately most of us regarded the boxes as a waste of space and threw them out as soon as we got them. 🙁

Tons of stuff, including:

- my Apple IIE w/ Monitor III
- my two(!) IBM PC Jrs with an original IBM monitor
- my first 486DX2 66MHz rig
- my Socket 5 Pentium 166MHz non-MMX rig

I threw most of these at all around the same time, for various dumb reasons. For the PC Jrs, I simply didn't have the money or resources at the time to do anything useful with them, and I had no way of upgrading the ram beyond the stock 128k or getting any software onto them. For the 486, it started acting up after I tried upgrading the storage on it, not knowing anything about drive overlay software or BIOS limitations. For the Apple IIE, I liked having it, but figured it was redundant since I already had a IIGS. For the Pentium, I thought some of the RAM on it was bad, and its performance for gaming wasn't that great. I was about 13/14 when I threw these machines out, and I'm still kicking myself for it to this very day.

My familys first PC: http://pbclub.pwcsite.com/wiki/index.php?title=Legend_201CD
When it got thrown away it had 36MB RAM and a POD83. 🙁

My older brother got one of these second hand from one of our uncles: http://hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=586
We used it as a server for some time. Specs: 486DX(2?) 50MHz, 32MB RAM, Adaptec EISA SCSI adapter, 3com EISA 10mbit ethernet adapter, 1,3GB SCSI harddrive (big as two CD-ROM drives).

Not so much throwing away (things get piled in the loft / shed), but not getting...
1. Case with a rare dual 5 1/4" + 3 1/2" dual format floppy drive (1 drive!) ... regret even more now I just looked that thing up!
2. A 286 system that I could have taken away free

I had MechWarrior 2 and Mercenaries Titanium. I threw out the boxes, and loaned out the discs. Now, granted that's not the the best set of MechWarrior games out there, but it's still interesting and has some selling points.

I found more on the internet, but they cost way more than I paid for them in the late 90s at a Babbages (10 bucks each, and my dad paid for half). And they're a bit crunched up.

I think we previously had a similar thread, but I didn't post in that.
Hmm. We gave away our first PC (Amstrad PC1640, really great XT) to a friend who in turn gave it away when he upgraded to something faster.
Sold the Game Blaster (!) we used in that PC after upgrading to a Sound Blaster.
Probably gave away (ie. I'd have to search if it still is buried somewhere) the first Sound Blaster which should have been an 1.0.