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You guys ever feel bad about tossing something instead of fixing it?

U

Unknown_K

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Tonight I dragged my screwed up 19" Sony 420GS monitor to the curb for trash pickup. I kept it around for years figuring I would get it fixed someday.

Recently my city decided to do its own trash pickups instead of paying waste management or whatever they are called to do it (they charge us something like $20 and the city only paid $7 a house for the service). Anyway that means come sometime in July they will only take special trash bins they spent millions for since their trucks can pick it up without a guy having to come out. Unlimited service will be over and I bet they will get picky on what we can dump in them as well. So after carefully thinking about if/when I would ever get the monitor fixed I decided to dump it while I still can.

Thing is I felt kind of bad getting rid of that monitor. I purchased it new for $500+ and it worked great for a long time till it baked itself to death (they do get hot).
 
Usually I don't toss a good hardware, I fix as much as I can and recycle components.

The worst feeling is in my case with undiagnosed hardware. If it's broken and I know what's damaged, there are no parts in my workshop, no perspectives that parts will be available - I save good parts tossing the unit, maybe I'll get second unit with broken parts which I have good.

I have two Asus notebooks, not so old, one Pentium 4, second one AMD Turion, but these can be slowly seen on recycling plants.
Pentium 4 had hinge problem, then LCD broke from it. Now it is used to control IC testers and EPROM programmers in my workbench. It has no LCD, it is connected to "service display" in a workshop through KVM. Saved much space under desk.
Turion one... my primary working unit now, reached a level in which there are no repairs, there's a necromancy.
Last time I pushed a CRT display to recycling, but I saved some components needed for servicing other hardware in the future, or maybe building something other.
OK, to be honest, it looks quite complete from outside. And it has all PCBs...
...even few components are still on them.
 
if I feel badly enough about it ill give it away for parts, otherwise if its true trash ill him-haw and bite the bullet, either way its not an instant decision
 
Sometimes, it comes down to the question of what your time is worth. In industry, many placed have a do not repair policy, because otherwise they'd have folks spending $5000 of engineers' time fixing a $500 piece of kit.

That calculus doesn't map identically to private life, as it fails to account for personal satisfaction and hobby enjoyment. But even allowing for that, such activities are time rivalrous - would you rather spend your weekend working on a 1970s minicomputer or a 2013 flat screen TV?
 
I've done my absolute best to avoid throwing stuff away unless I'm absolutely sure it's not worth saving. I did throw out a few computers when I was first starting out. Of course, saving stuff has caused certain other problems, particularly with regards to space.......... :rolleyes:
 
I had an old Tandy CM-1 someone gave me with a Tandy 3000HD years ago...the CM-1 had a terrible image, but it was readable and worked...used it for a while until I got an EGA monitor and card to go with it. The CM-1 sat around in the original box for quite a while, and when it came time to move out of my parents house 15 years ago, I pitched it. Of course I now know more how rare it is...should have kept it.

10 years ago we were moving and it was time to thin the basement herd of "stuff" since the new house had not basement. There have been a number of things I regretted getting rid of...but among them was an NEC MultiSync monitor...just another CGA monitor, right? I've since found out, no not "just" another CGA monitor. Sigh...

Due to the space they take up in storage, I struggle to have a desire to hang onto any monitors that aren't unique in some manner...a non-working VGA...nah, no regrets. Of course, like the examples above, 10-15 years out it may be a different story! :)

Wesley
 
One of my biggest regrets was tossing my LC 475 some years ago, during a junk cleanout. It was small and kind of funky to work with (and some "surgery" I'd done to expand the RAM also killed the floppy drive), but 68k machines are super rare now, and I miss playing with NetBSD on mine.
 
After two house moves, I threw out my first computer, a Commodore 64. It had the blue screen and no prompt issue that I could have fixed easily with my knowledge now but I finally threw it away many year ago. Oddly enough, I kept my power supply, joysticks and box of floppies that had been reused more often then a porta-potty at a chili festival. Repurchasing that Commodore 64 because emulation wasn't good enough got me going in this hobby. I guess it wasn't a bad thing after all.
 
if I can't find a use for something, and I have no sentimental attachment to it, I have no qualms about throwing things away.
 
We usually don't throw any, we try to fix it. If we've done everything we could, that's the time that we throw it away.
 
Trixter said:
About 10 years ago I threw away a "spare" 5150 case. I have no earthly idea what I was thinking at the time.
Click to expand...
Probably the same thing I was thinking when tossing a full tower AT case 15+ years ago, takes up space don't need it. Now I have a nice dual Pentium 1 AT board waiting for a nice case to put it in.
 
Yea, a few years before I found this site I threw out a bunch of stuff. The vast majority of it was very well FUBARed garbage, but there were a couple of items I feel bad about tossing.
 
What goes around comes around. Yesterday I picked up an RCA TruFlat 20-inch CRT TV with built-in digital tuner from the curb. Even after sitting outside in the rain, it works perfectly. With a production date of June 2008, it's one of the last brand-name CRT TVs ever sold in the USA; by 2009, only a few cheapo brands like Dynex and Haier were still selling CRT TVs.

sdtv_truflat_25inch_rca_tv_1_lgw.jpg
 
vwestlife said:
What goes around comes around. Yesterday I picked up an RCA TruFlat 20-inch CRT TV with built-in digital tuner from the curb. Even after sitting outside in the rain, it works perfectly. With a production date of June 2008, it's one of the last brand-name CRT TVs ever sold in the USA; by 2009, only a few cheapo brands like Dynex and Haier were still selling CRT TVs.

sdtv_truflat_25inch_rca_tv_1_lgw.jpg
Click to expand...
Dynex and Insignia are just Best Buy brand names so who knows who the actual manufacturer is.

Sony made some widescreen CRT TV's at the end, they must have been nice.
 
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