I think there should be a 9o’clock bar special day.

The previous charges for recycling, BTW, weren’t shipping charges — even if you hand-delivered the stuff to the recycling site, the $50 or so was the charge for recycling. As Jess mentioned, that’s a great way to guarantee that all the valuable and/or toxic stuff ends up in a landfill.

Meanwhile, speaking of the ABQ Journal, I’ve got a new article about the International truck … I’m planning on forwarding it to John H, but if anyone else is interested, let me know.

HaHaHaHa ROTFLMFAO! Fuego, you slay!

In my above missive, I forgot to mention I had checked into using the old computer as a dedicated processor for climateprediction.net. They are like SETI@home, where they get volunteers to use the downtime of their computers to run climate model experiments. The rub is that the minimum requirement is an 800mhz processor – the old girl is 164mhz. Anybody feel like helping research into global warming might want to check them out: http://www.climateprediction.net

Pat, I agree, that the shipping charge is a good way to have old computers end up in landfills. The computer manufacturers need to be smarter than that. Come on manufu’s, do the right thing and cough up the shipping expense.

(1) pay somebody big bucks to recycle the computer via shipping to a center, or (2) be environmentally irresponsible and stuff the thing in the trash. (Variation: disassemble the unit, trash the case and power supply, but leave circuit boards on a back shelf.)

About once a year, I think the City of Albuquerque and Intel sponsor a computer recycling day. Usually when we’re out of town, of course.

Pat

Secondly, with apologies, I’m about to go off topic. Occasionally we MR&HBIites don’t follow along with subject of the entry. But this is a great community, and I appreciate the freedom here. Thusly, the offtopic topic…

I have spent the morning trying to figure out what to do with my old computer. The more technical MR&HBIites will laugh at me for having gotten from 1996 to 2004 with a Micron PC Pentium I, Windows 95, 132meg RAM, and a 32baud modem. What can I say, I do 99.9% of my computing at work, I didn’t need anything better at home. We had to quit the old girl because it couldn’t find its modem anymore (probably after some mischief by a virus or somesuch – who would write a virus to work on such an old thing?).

Anywho, Ebay has a site devoted to recycling electronics. I used their quote calculater just to make sure I shouldn’t try to sell it first. My quote was $0.00. At least there was no negative sign. “Sure we’ll buy it…if’n ya PAY us!” So the only option is to take it to be recycled.

But man that’s surprisingly hard to accept. To tear off the case, grind the innards, scrap the metal, bind the hazardous materials.

It.Still.Works.

And works well. It’s just that, unlike a 39 Ford or a Model T, it can’t even approach highway speeds. How can something work so well (and if I was a PC guru, even the modem oughto work well) and be so dag-blamed obsolete. So not-even-in-the-category of “oooh this retro toaster will look great in your kitchen” or “except for the blaupunkt stereo with GPS, this 65 Mustang is all original.” Compliments to Micron for making a solid peice of hardware. I wonder what ever became of them.