Over the years, the back rooms of my house have turned into a sort of computer salvage yard and recycling center. Numerous shelves are stacked with all sorts of bits and pieces salvaged from otherwise dead machines. If you need a replacement thingamabob for your computer, odds are I have one.
Every year or so, though, I have to thin out my burgeoning collection. As time goes on, perfectly functional components become obsolete simply because they are no longer used by modern systems. Entire computer systems also become obsolete, as they cannot live up to modern computing standards.
There’s nothing wrong with them, per se, it’s just that nobody wants them anymore. Sometimes, they can be chopped up and certain elements recycled. That’s the preferred way to get rid of old computer junk.
This year’s weeding out of the salvage yard led me to one of my very own old computers. I’d been hanging on to this thing for a long time. A mere shell of its former, glorious self, all the good parts had already been stripped away. Even the case was obsolete. It was time for “old faithful” to go.
I built this machine around the year 2000, and used it up until 2006, or so. At the time of its birth, it was one of the fastest computers on my block. It sported a super-fast 1 gigahertz (GHz) processor (pathetic, by today’s standards), a massive 256 megabytes (MB) of random-access memory (RAM) (unusable, by today’s standards) and a ginormous 7 gigabyte (GB) hard drive (ridiculous, by today’s standards).
I spent well over $1,000 building this computer, and it served me well until the motherboard (a computer’s main circuit board) went bad. At the time it kicked the bucket, it wasn’t really worth fixing. Besides, I had already acquired numerous, more powerful machines. Into the salvage yard it went.
The moral of this story is to encourage you not to get too worked up about how much your computer cost when it was new. Accept the reality that computers are not an investment, meaning that they are not going to appreciate in monetary value.
In truth, computers are an expense, just like cars are an expense. They break down and need new parts. They need maintenance and upkeep. If you keep them long enough, they may just plain-old wear out and need to retire to that great computer salvage yard in the sky, or, in the back of my house. They depreciate in value like crazy.
Viewed in that way, my $1,000 computer, used for six years (2,190 days), cost me about 45 cents per day. That’s not too bad a price to pay for the pleasure of using a good computer.
Other computing devices, like printers, may not last nearly as long. Printers are so cheap these days that I wonder if they shouldn’t be considered disposable commodities, right up front. A printer costing $100, even if it only lasts for a year, still only costs about 27 cents per day to own.
Of course, that’s not taking into account the outrageous cost of ink cartridges. But that, dear readers, is a different column.