Trading good stuff for what could be considered junk...

I just traded our friends an LCD monitor... my only one, for a bunch of old hardware. Kacie and Mike needed, it, and they've helped us out by letting us borrow some old clothes for the kids, so I'm certainly happy to to the trade.

But I actually *like* playing with old hardware. It reminds me of the time when I played with hardware for fun, and I never feel scared that I'm going to break it. Worse case scenario, my son wants to do what he sees me doing, and he jams a screwdriver into a motherboard or hard drive. Better that, than destroying the stuff I'm actually working on. Gotta wash his hands after he plays with it though... he'll probably get lead poisoning... none of that old stuff is RoHS compliant.

I got a 16-port 10/100 switch... I already had one, but I didn't have any dog-ears for it. This one has a serial port for console management or something and the mounting brackets. That one day, when I get a mini-rack for all my old systems, so I don't have a bunch of ATX clases laying around, It'll come in handy.

I got a working laptop, with a broken hinge/lid. Installed OpenSUSE 11.0 RC1 on it last night, while I was working on assembling the Grill, got on it and checked some messages, and it worked great, for what it was... 800x600 was kind of painful on it, but, eh... whatever. I could probably deal with it being broken, since my laptop still has no RAM or power supply. Maybe I can find a lid and actually fix it.... Who knows... I could certainly just run it closed, and hook up a monitor. I guess when I go to get some old laptop RAM, I'll get some for this too... 256 MB is kind of slow, especially when you're using 16 MB for video.

I got a couple of old machines with PC100 RAM, sound cards, network cards, modems, an AGP nvidia card and...a firewire card with an *INTERNAL* port with *HEADER PINS*. The only thing I use with firewire these days would be an old iPod, or a video camera. But, I often get cases with firewire ports, but don't have motherboards with a firewire port. That card will be useful for me, since I can't bear to have a port on a case that doesn't do anything, even if I don't use it. Sweet action.

I'm probably going to toss the cases, but I did get a DVD-ROM and another CD-ROM to add to my collection. Ive got like 30 CD-ROM drives... I would probably double my geek status if I made a machine with [a bunch] of CD-ROM drives that just ripped audio CDs to a network storage device.

Oh, and I got a printer an HP Photosmart 7350. I thought it'd work for my mom-in-law's computer upgrade that's kind of gone awry, with her old printer not being supported at all, but this one is old too, and HP basically says, "treat this printer like a DeskJet 5550". I actually had that printer, and it was junk within a year. This printer didn't work out for her, so I'll probably send it to my Mom, so she can use it on her Mac.