[RULE] Small hardware donations

[Martin Stricker]

Paul Nijjar wrote:

>         - RAM (we are throwing away 4MB and 8MB 72 pin RAM)

Keep the 8MB ones and throw away the 4MB ones - RAM is always useful.
You should try to run http://www.memtest86.com/ or the newer
http://www.memtest.org/ on them before storing.

>         - CPUs (we have some Pentium-1 class CPUs, up to 133MHz)

CPUs are often useful as well. Test them before storing as well. If they
have a cooler or (even better) a fan, test and store them as well.

>         - Maybe hard drives (we have many 500MB drives)

Those drives are often very big and heavy, so expect higher shipping
costs. OTOH if you are shipping a bunch of material, that doesn't matter
that much. Try to store the best (smallest/lightest) drives and run a
hardware check on them - a harddrive that shows its first bad sectors
will die soon - bad sectors seem to be contagious.

>         Another question: are there other smallish components we
> should stockpile?

Motherboards for the different CPUs (you won't need many of them, but a
few of each type for spare are always good. Many people keep CPUs but
throw mobos away - but a CPU without mobo is worthless...). Look if the
elkos look fine, check the load of the CMOS battery (keep all still
loaded CMOS batteries! I don't think you can easily buy them anymore),
and test if they boot - IU often had trouble with BIOS checksum errors
preventing bootup, mostly after replacing long dead CMOS batteries.

Cards, especially network and graphics cards, because these weren't
standard back then. If you store SCSI harddrives, you should store SCSI
cards as well, or the drives will be useless. Also you should keep a few
spare graphics cards, both ISA and PCI style - they are slowly vanishing
for AGP cards. If you find any other cards, store them, they might be
useful. I'm watchimg TV on this PC (Pentium-I MMX 166) with an old TV
tuner card.

Screws. As funny as this might sound, I'm always low on screws for
drives, mobos, cards, cases.

Monitors. Yes, they are too heavy to ship, but you should keep a few of
the best monitors as spares for your own project - monitors cannot be
repaired by just replacing a defunct part, and they are still rather
expensive. Only keep colour monitors of at least 15' (but note that some
very old graphics cards for i386/i486 have a different plug that current
monitors, so be careful what you choose).

>         Shipping costs might be an issue, especially if we ship out
> hard drives. We might be able to work out that issue when we get to
> it, however. I can't imagine shipping for small components would be
> that much, but I have been surprised before.

I think the receiver of the parts should pay for the shipping costs, so
he will decide if it is worth the money or not.

As an exaple, I'm desparately looking for one or two *working* systems
each of i386/SX, i386/DX, i486/SX and i486/DX (the last one I'll get in
a year when our old Interactive Unix server at work will be retired) for
my home test booth. If anyone can help (not I'm in Germany), I would be
happy!

Best regards,
Martin Stricker
-- 
Homepage: http://www.martin-stricker.de/
Linux Migration Project: http://www.linux-migration.org/
Red Hat Linux 9 for low memory: http://www.rule-project.org/
Registered Linux user #210635: http://counter.li.org/


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