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pseydtonneI score stuff. I used to do it because I wished I had things but I could not afford them, so I picked out what I could and built from the parts. Now I can afford things but I enjoy the process of gathering parts to give something useful to someone. Call it scrounging, call it dumpster diving, call it creepy but I do not mind. I have a montagnard army and I'm not afraid to dissect any of it.
Sometimes it's not about where you find it. It was cold inside the office today because it takes an entire day to ramp up the air conditioning where I work and it'll be a scorcher tomorrow. Thus I was freezing in my polo shirt. I saw a long sleeved shirt sitting on a book shelf in a meeting room. It had been sitting there so long that no one remembered who owned it. So I pulled it over my arms to warm up. It was working, so i called dibs on the shirt. Then I went to the head and changed into this shirt. Even though it's XL and not XXL, it fit me beautifully. I guess I have been losing weight.
Last week I got a call from my friend Stewart. He had been dropping off his garbage when he found a Dell desktop someone had tossed and wondered whether I wanted it. Indeed I did. After I drained half a can of air getting the dust bunnies to quit claim, I found out this was a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4 with half a gig of RAM, a 40 GB hard drive, a DVD-ROM and separate burner. It even had two internal modems (I guess for those special occasions), a network card and a burned-out nVidia GeForce4 video card.
One of the things I have learned from gathering stuff is how stuff falls apart. There is always a weak point on consumer-grade equipment or you'd never replace it. Consumer-grade video cards now run faster than CPUs did in the late Nineties, which means they often need active heatsinks with fans. They have to skinny down the height of the heatsink because it may have other electronic slot cards next to it. So they put a fast fan with the tiniest axle on a hunk of aluminum. It wears out whatever crummy lubrication it is sealed with (ball bearings are too big for this device) and melts down. Then the GPU (graphics processing unit, the main chip in the graphics card) fries out. It'll keep working but everything will look dark, lines will streak the screen. To think this card cost $300 or more when it was new.
I suspect the previous owner of this Dimension 4500 saw the screen fading or much worse (I didn't even bother to see what kind of mess it looked like -- I took it right out) and decided to buy a whole computer. This person also went to some lengths to tidy up -- the box had the default Windows XP Home installation, no user apps and no documents. That's like hiring a maid and an organizer then torching the house.
All I had to purchase was a basic graphics card. Now my parents have a new computer. I even found a 17" CRT monitor recently, so I'll have a good gift for them when I see them this weekend. This also likely means I'll have to go to Utica and plug in the wires for them. This is the third machine I have built them: the first was a Dell with a 200 MHz MMX chip and a max of 64 MB RAM, second is a Dell with a 433 MHz Celeron and a max of 192 MB RAM. Both of those were actually used the same Windows 98SE installation on one drive (ah, for the days before Hardware Abstraction Layer lock-in). This will be a lovely replacement.
Stuff finds me. I can look at certain things in the trash and just know they want to be reborn and they have new plans with their second lives. I keep a list in my head of things my friends and relatives need and match things I find. Let's hope I don't get my balls broken for it.
-gift horse, Dante
Sometimes it's not about where you find it. It was cold inside the office today because it takes an entire day to ramp up the air conditioning where I work and it'll be a scorcher tomorrow. Thus I was freezing in my polo shirt. I saw a long sleeved shirt sitting on a book shelf in a meeting room. It had been sitting there so long that no one remembered who owned it. So I pulled it over my arms to warm up. It was working, so i called dibs on the shirt. Then I went to the head and changed into this shirt. Even though it's XL and not XXL, it fit me beautifully. I guess I have been losing weight.
Last week I got a call from my friend Stewart. He had been dropping off his garbage when he found a Dell desktop someone had tossed and wondered whether I wanted it. Indeed I did. After I drained half a can of air getting the dust bunnies to quit claim, I found out this was a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4 with half a gig of RAM, a 40 GB hard drive, a DVD-ROM and separate burner. It even had two internal modems (I guess for those special occasions), a network card and a burned-out nVidia GeForce4 video card.
One of the things I have learned from gathering stuff is how stuff falls apart. There is always a weak point on consumer-grade equipment or you'd never replace it. Consumer-grade video cards now run faster than CPUs did in the late Nineties, which means they often need active heatsinks with fans. They have to skinny down the height of the heatsink because it may have other electronic slot cards next to it. So they put a fast fan with the tiniest axle on a hunk of aluminum. It wears out whatever crummy lubrication it is sealed with (ball bearings are too big for this device) and melts down. Then the GPU (graphics processing unit, the main chip in the graphics card) fries out. It'll keep working but everything will look dark, lines will streak the screen. To think this card cost $300 or more when it was new.
I suspect the previous owner of this Dimension 4500 saw the screen fading or much worse (I didn't even bother to see what kind of mess it looked like -- I took it right out) and decided to buy a whole computer. This person also went to some lengths to tidy up -- the box had the default Windows XP Home installation, no user apps and no documents. That's like hiring a maid and an organizer then torching the house.
All I had to purchase was a basic graphics card. Now my parents have a new computer. I even found a 17" CRT monitor recently, so I'll have a good gift for them when I see them this weekend. This also likely means I'll have to go to Utica and plug in the wires for them. This is the third machine I have built them: the first was a Dell with a 200 MHz MMX chip and a max of 64 MB RAM, second is a Dell with a 433 MHz Celeron and a max of 192 MB RAM. Both of those were actually used the same Windows 98SE installation on one drive (ah, for the days before Hardware Abstraction Layer lock-in). This will be a lovely replacement.
Stuff finds me. I can look at certain things in the trash and just know they want to be reborn and they have new plans with their second lives. I keep a list in my head of things my friends and relatives need and match things I find. Let's hope I don't get my balls broken for it.
-gift horse, Dante
