Productive weekend

[arduinna]

For the past couple of years, I've been clearing stuff out, slowly; I'm a packrat by nature, so there's been a lot to do. I've donated somewhere around 2,000 books, hundreds of CDs, bags and bags and bags of clothes, furniture, lamps, electronics... you name it, particularly over the past year.

The one thing I haven't touched is the old computers. I have several, and they've been piling up in corners for over a decade -- partly because it used to be so expensive to buy new computers that I wanted to keep a backup around in case my new computer died, and partly because recycling them was a pain in the ass.

Best Buy has a pretty good recycling program now, though, so a few months ago I asked therienne to remove the hard drives for me so I could recycle the systems. But the drives didn't want to come out, and we had to be somewhere, so I said screw it, let's finish this later, and that was that. The two half-pulled-apart computers took up residence in my bedroom under a blanket so I didn't cut myself on the metal edges sticking out, and I put them out of my mind till a more convenient pulling-apart day.

That day was yesterday. therienne came over again and yanked apart a third computer that had since died and was taking up space on my office floor (our hand-built old vidding computer, which I'd been using since my last computer got too creaky to use anymore. woe.). Then I brought her the other two, in pieces, and she went at them.

The ancient Packard-Bell that I bought in 1996 didn't put up much of a fight; she yanked out the 4 G original drive and the 6 G secondary drive that I had installed a couple years later (10 gigs! in one computer! It was to swoon). We boggled briefly at the Ditto drive she pulled out. I had forgotten Ditto drives even existed, never mind that I had one once; I know I never used it. (To the best of my knowledge, this computer still worked, Windows 95 and all.)

The Dell that I bought in 2000 to replace the old PB was a struggle, which we knew it would be. It had already lost 80% of its case in the first attempt during the summer, and now the rest of it came off, with some prying with screwdrivers. She wound up having to pull basically every single thing out before she could get the hard drives out. There may have been some cursing. (This computer also still worked; I used it for almost 10 years before trading it out for the vidding computer, which was in worse shape but had a whole lot more power and RAM and was thus less frustrating overall.)

By this time there was a pile of broken apart computers in the corner, and a shopping bag full of the various bits that had been pulled out of them in the quest for hard drives.

Then she asked if I had any more, and I said, well, just my aunt's, down in the basement. "We may as well take care of it now!" said therienne, so off I trotted to get it, and found not just that, but bags of old keyboards and mice, and an old laptop. So I hauled all of that back up, too.

Aunt J's computer was a tiny Gateway tower that came apart like a dream. It only had one hard drive, which went on the growing stack of drives to be smashed.

And then came the laptop. It was a 1998 Hitachi that originally belonged to therienne, who was using it back when I met her, and who eventually passed it on to me when it was pretty near the end of its life, so I could have something to use in the living room if I wanted it. I babied it along for another couple of years, then stuck it in the basement when it finally crapped out completely.

This? Was a nightmare to pull apart. therienne undid every screw she could find, and it held together. She pushed slidey things, and it held together. She removed the lid, and it held together. Finally she gave up and started literally shoving a screwdriver into the edges of it -- this wasn't like me helping to pry the cover off the Dell, this was utter destruction. Hitachi built seriously solid laptops, man. Finally the back came off -- but there was still no hard drive visible. She wound up having to go down another layer, prying off more plastic with sharp metal instruments. But at last we got it, and the tiny laptop drive is now sitting atop the pile of hard drives to be smashed.

The best part about it, though, was the battery. I actually had to stop therienne so I could get my phone and take this picture:




And then we loaded everything -- four computers, a laptop, two keyboards, and two shopping bags' worth of assorted innards and cables -- into therienne's car and drove to Best Buy, where I went in and got a flatbed cart, which we loaded up and trucked in. I wasn't sure they'd take it all; technically the policy is "three items per car", and um. But the woman at the desk took one look at us and said "You can just leave the cart over here" and cleared a space, so once we'd emptied the bags of crap out onto it, we left. After I took a picture, because dude.





And now my apartment is that much cleaner than it was. \o/

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[arduinna]

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