Ha! Once you have them, those technology friends (computers, TVs, cassette players...) are hard to divest. Not only does it cost $$ to discard them, but they have important pieces of your life on them that exist nowhere else. They're like personal scrapbooks with a screen and keyboard.
The whole business of stripping the contents before trashing or selling or loaning is quite interesting. There are programs that assist. I used one called "Window Washer" once. We took a tv, two printers, two vcr's and a remote to the recycling center and had to pay $79 to have them taken off our hands.I have a rule of thumb that one always overestimates the amount of 'important' stuff on the hard disk (and in other records, computerized and not.)
That's so funny. Just yesterday a friend and I were discussing how we would like a company to invent a computer for people our age, with promises that nothing on it--software, system, formatting, nothing whatsoever--would ever ever change
A mature retired professor said to me recently,"I hate change!" I sympathize but I am pretty sure that we only live by change. Besides, industrial and technological and social change, there is simple aging. Still, I imagine that less change in a computer system would find interested customers. One reason we accumulated so many machines was my resistance to modifications that didn't seem called for.I got an ipad today;-)
My most technologically sophisticated friend is impressed with the iPad and believes it may change computing. He also said that iPad sales have set records for both number of sales and speed making many sales in a short time.Well, you're never bored! I just treated myself to an iPad2 and am having fun playing with it. It's seems to be an iPod with a screen that these old eyes can actually see. I feel a bit guilty about it because I thought I could use it as an educational tool, but so far it feels more like a toy. I've got to explore those billions of apps to see if I can find something to ease my guilt. We only have 2 computers in our house…3, if you count my new toy.
One of the gifts of life here and now is the internet and what it makes possible. Beginning and maintaining a blog and getting and receiving emails is indeed a major factor in my efforts to remain alive and functioning. Creating a wireless network and trying to make a single remote function on several low-end machines yesterday was not all fun but it too was not boring. @!#$&&!
