hand-me-downs posts

We all love upgrades -- whether it's just an additional stick of memory, a new sound card, or a whole new rig -- but there's the small matter of what to do with the upgraded-from stuff. At some point, all your tech-averse family members will have systems built out of your cast-off components, and want something a tad more potent than a P3 800. At the same time, your significant other, who has caught onto the fact that fragging you is an excellent way of relieving stress, will demand to be on equal technical footing.

You are, in short, eventually going to be stuck with some dead tech. Or, as a reader of this column, something more akin to a moderately-sized drift of it. The laws of physics being what they are, and lacking a handy TARDIS in most of our spare bedrooms, we will eventually need to do something about it.

There is a tremendous amount of discussion as far as what to do when your PC reaches end-of-life (and, truly, this has hit close to home for BI, as the three-year old Dell at his day job gave him the electronic middle finger, and summarily refused to boot this week, earning much-needed retirement, and subsequent replacement with a shinier, faster, and far less recalcitrant black obelisk).

But what should you do with that dead tech? Googling "old computers never die" yields more than six million results.