Help me be ruthless with chucking out old (ie. useless) hardware

[mikeymikec]

One qualifying bit of information for whether to chuck things out: I fix computers for a living, so that sometimes includes older computers. I do have a few customers with PCs that are >10 years old.

I've just moved house and I'm finding homes for items (I don't have precisely the same furniture because the place we rented had a couple of bits of fitted furniture). Amongst my collection of hardware I have found (I'll update the list as I go through boxes, so if you respond, please mention the bit of hardware in question):

1 - 2x PATA data cable (UDMA66)
2 - 2.5" to 3.5" IDE data cable

 

[VirtualLarry]

Somewhere in my collection, I still have a large cardboard box with loads of "rounded" IDE and floppy (1-device) cables. I bought them when they went on sale at svc.com years ago, and I still haven't managed to divest myself of them. Do yourself a favor, get rid of them sooner than later.

I wish I had some customers for a number of desktops I've built over the years in an attempt to sell. Seems most people, just use theirs until it dies, then they either go buy a laptop, or another desktop, whatever the current one is at BestBuy or Dell.com. Seems like only "gamers" want custom desktops. That, and all of my family and friends (they are all "desktop people", for the most part), except for my Mom, whom seemingly only uses her laptop anymore. (She has multiple laptops and desktops, that I've built her over the years.)

As far as "new" desktops, I've got:
Intel H61 / G1610 / Ivy Bridge dual-cores
AMD A55M / A4-6300 / Richland APUs (kind of not-quite-snappy, though that may have more to do with inclusion or lack of dual-channel than anything else)
AMD AM1 / Sempron 3850 quad-core APUs (slow, very slow, in Firefox, but CloudReady / ChromiumOS / Chromium is actually quite speedy on these.)
Intel H81 / G1820 / Haswell dual-cores (These are actually still pretty speedy these days, surprisingly, with enough RAM and an SSD)
Intel H81 / G3258 (4.0Ghz+) / Haswell overclocked dual-cores (I have some of these in custom SFF cases, I call them "Facebook rockets".)
Intel G3900, G4400, and more recently, G4560 CPU-based rigs, with DDR4 and SSD. Also some gaming rigs based on these, with 8GB DDR4, and a GTX video card. These are still pretty current. (Would be nice if I could sell one or two. Although, I've sold one to a friend, with a Z170 ATX board, 16GB DDR4-2400, and a 240GB SSD, on a two-year payment plan.)
AMD B350 / Ryzen 3 1200 CPU-based rigs (These are my most recent build(s). With PCI-E M.2 NVMe SSDs, they should fly. The one I've built so far, I overclocked manually to 3.80Ghz. Still, the SSD I put in, was only a 128GB TLC, but with an SLC cache (Plextor), but it seems a touch slower at writes than a SATA6G MLC SSD.)

Edit: Oh yeah, forgot the two:
AMD A55M / A4-3420 (FM1) APU rigs. (Bought these parts based on waltchan's suggestion. So far, I've given a few of them away. They're actually not horrible, when running Windows 10 Home and SSDs, and 2x2GB DDR3-1600 (dual-channel is mostly a must for AMD desktop APUs). They are able to overclock, but not by much, unless you switch from AHCI to IDE mode for disks, which cripples the SSD nearly as much as you gain from the increased CPU performance, at least for web browsing tasks. I would consider them almost as snappy for web browsing as the G1820 CPUs, when these A4-3420 APUs are overclocked over 3.0Ghz,)

 

[mikeymikec]

I only build desktops to order. At some point I may have a 'current gen' desktop PC ready-made to sell and replace my one in stock when it gets sold, but I can only readily think of one sale I lost maybe 7 years ago because I didn't have one ready to sell on the spot.

I've binned those PATA cables (and the PATA 2.5" to 3.5" adapter), as well as a Celery G1610, a G620, an AMD X2 250, A64 3500 (I think I only held on to this 'temporarily' after upgrading a customer's system several months ago), and an A64 X2 5200. I helped justify the processor binning by ebaying the auction status / buy it now prices and deemed them a waste of time.

 

[Yuriman]

I'm at the point where anything older than 1156 gets binned. PATA is long gone. Most people look at VGA cables and scratch their heads, so I'm trying to get rid of everything VGA too, and move to HDMI or DP. 20 pin power supplies don't have enough utility (24 can work with older 20 pin boards).

Truth about most of this ancient junk is that you can replace it for $2 shipped on eBay, so there's little point in keeping a stock of it. People with ancient machines just have to deal with waiting 3-4 days.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

I'm at the point where anything older than 1156 gets binned. PATA is long gone.

+1 to that. I'm at the point were everything SB/Llano and older is due for replacement. Anything pre-DX11 and USB3 gets chugged.

Once RR arrives, I'll finally be able to retire a few older F&F systems.

Most people look at VGA cables and scratch their heads, so I'm trying to get rid of everything VGA too, and move to HDMI or DP. 20 pin power supplies don't have enough utility (24 can work with older 20 pin boards).

You're lucky. VGA is still very much in use here, despite my repeated attempts to get rid of it.

Truth about most of this ancient junk is that you can replace it for $2 shipped on eBay, so there's little point in keeping a stock of it. People with ancient machines just have to deal with waiting 3-4 days.

I keep a few rare and/or unusual CPUs as collection pieces, rest gets binned. If I'd ever need such a part, the system is long overdue for replacement anyway.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I only build desktops to order. At some point I may have a 'current gen' desktop PC ready-made to sell and replace my one in stock when it gets sold, but I can only readily think of one sale I lost maybe 7 years ago because I didn't have one ready to sell on the spot.

That's ... probably wise. LOL.

 

[mikeymikec]

That's ... probably wise. LOL.

It was a lesson I learnt in one of my first jobs in a tech company - I took on the job of maintaining the spare hardware stock. I thought it would be a good idea to keep at least one hard drive in stock, but then a newer, higher capacity drive came along (in the days where there was a good chance that the larger size mattered, so I stocked one of those, then I learnt a few things about hard drives and which ones were faster etc, so I stocked according to that knowledge... before I realised what was really happening to the inventory, I had several hard drives in stock when I only needed one, and if you need to replace a drive, you're almost invariably going to pick the best drive to replace it with so therefore the older drives just sat there gathering dust. And next day delivery will usually suffice

Since starting my own business I once inadvertently ended up with a WD Black 3.5" in stock (in the era where I had already started mostly selling SSDs). That drive sat in a drawer for at least a year before I sold it. Perhaps if I gave less of a crap about selling the most appropriate choice to a customer rather than what's more convenient for me to sell them, it wouldn't have spent so long in that drawer

Occasionally keeping old hardware pays off, like selling an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5x00 AM2 that I got for free Generally it doesn't.

Re: VGA - I'd say about half of my desktop-using customers are still using VGA despite me recommending and replacing whenever appropriate with DVI since about 2004. I've seen new "desktop" systems in the last 4 or so years that only had VGA ports for video output.

 

[VirtualLarry]

+1 to that. I'm at the point were everything SB/Llano and older is due for replacement. Anything pre-DX11 and USB3 gets chugged.

Once RR arrives, I'll finally be able to retire a few older F&F systems.

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to RR, on possibly an ITX board, with a juicy 500GB M.2 PCI-E drive (Samsung 960 EVO?). Then again, for Mom, I could probably get away with a 250GB SSD, but the 500GB ones are often faster.

Who am I kidding, though, she doesn't even use her desktops at all, any more. I'm sure that's true for a lot of people these days.

 

[XavierMace]

I've been chipping away at my stockpile. If it's worth less than $100 it either gets donated or gets tossed in the trash. I've gotten rid of most of the "normal" loose parts save for a couple of extra SSD's. Built a rig out of old/spare parts when I did my Ryzen setup and sold that which took care of most of it. My "abnormal" stock pile is still far too large.

3x HP DL380 G6's
1x Supermicro 2u
1x IBM N6240 with 2 shelves
HP ProCurve 5412zl

A stack of spare fans and power supplies for both the HP's and Supermicro. Also still have a stack of spare Westmere EP's.