Given that a horde of knitters are coming over tonight for a yarn swap and space will be at a premium, I finally finished porting the files from my old computer so that it could be recycled.
My grandparents gave it to me when I went to college, thus making it the first computer that I didn’t share. It’s lived in three different states. It was my communication link to friends and family through college, during my first job in Boston, and through switching coasts and moving to Seattle. It’s seen zillions of emails and the creation of a blog. It wrote (sadly not without substantial late night help) 8 semesters worth of papers and coding assignments. It’s held ~1700 mp3s, 5 versions of tetris, an old version of SimCity, and the ever-important Snood. It withstood the beginnings of my computer-tinkering, accepting a new hard drive, cd burner, and OS. It was the last thing I disassembled when moving, and on arrival was generally reassembled before I finished unloading rest of the boxes from the car.
With this in mind, I’ve been putting off the final port of files, and the inevitable dumping. Last night, as its hour drew near, I was feeling very sad about abandoning it after its seven years of service. But then I turned it on and sat through the 8:12 minute boot, and the freezing explorer window, and listened to the loud fan, and remembered why I felt it was time for it to go. So, here’s one last picture for posterity:
RIP, computer.
(PS, I was also holding off after reading quite a few articles about how many of the “PC Recycle” centers here actually just sell the trashed computers to China, where they are burned, which leaches all sorts of terrible chemicals into the atmosphere, ground and water. A bit of Google-work later, I was happy to find the Take It Back Network, which provides a web of locations that will take computers, monitors, printers and peripherals, usually for a nominal fee, and dispose of them responsibly and locally/nationally under US environmental regulations. Even better, Staples provides this service nation-wide, for those that aren’t in the Seattle area.)
Susan…No question letting go is hard. But hopefully after all the love and nurturing that you gave your computer, it will rise to the occassion and flourish in the outside world.