intermittent fault computer

Today I shed a computer that passed hardware tests, yet nevertheless offered up the Blue Screen of Death in some pattern I was never able to parse. I got kernel panics running it with Linux, too. Customer support and I couldn’t come to an agreement over the issues. I can’t blame them all that much, since diagnostics never flagged anything. I finally got tired of all the time it was wasting and pulled its plug.

Percy declined to re-purpose the case as a cat throne.

I salvaged the hard and optical drives for other boxes, and planned to list the CPU, memory, and power supply on eBay. I wanted to recover at least part of the cost of the system. But I never got around to the reselling. This morning, while contemplating today’s shed, I realized why. I’ve never been confident that the fault causing the errors was on the motherboard. It could have been in the processor, or RAM, or even the power supply. I think those parts were okay, but I’m not certain. And I didn’t want to pass along a problem. So the case and components crowded my garage workbench for over a year.

I don’t hoard. I’m enjoying shedding most of this stuff. My clutter is caused by ambivalence, some unresolved conflict of values that gets me stuck. (“What’s the best place for this? I don’t want to put it someplace till I know where’s best.”) That’s helpful to see about the clutter and myself.

As I posted earlier this week, Dell pays Goodwill Industries to do end-of-life recycling and disposal for Dell equipment. So off to Goodwill it went. Good riddance.

shedding style: recycle
destination: business recycling program

Comments welcome … what might you shed today?

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