Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2011 > June > 27 > Entry
Computer purge helps close a few old chapters
From the American-Statesman photo archive. Very similar to the computer we’re recycling.
I’m sometimes not so skilled with taking my own advice, and one of the areas I tend to lapse the worst is with de-cluttering. In January, the year began with the promise of a clean sweep that would bring to our home office a new iMac, a new desk and a purge of books, discs, old gadgets and everything else that wasn’t essential in our upstairs home office.
That seems like such a long time ago.
Instead, we decided not to buy the iMac (I bought a laptop instead), the new desk was never ordered and while I got rid of all the wayward discs and all the excess paper, the room has been overtaken by bins old baby clothes, boxes and wires everywhere.
On Friday, we lost 12 newsroom employees to retirement buyouts. Perhaps it was my emotional state over the weekend, my sense that some chapters are ending while others are beginning that led me to spend a sunny Sunday afternoon prepping two old computers to leave our home.
When I bought a white Macbook about three or four years later, my wife got the iBook. Its battery died ages ago and it’s missing the F12 key (where could that be? I’m sure we’d notice an F12 key lying around the house. It would say “F12.”). But plugged in, the iBook worked fine and until she got an iPad, it was my wife’s main computer. Now that I’ve bought a MacBook Pro, my wife gets the Macbook (which she’ll probably use sparingly). The iBook, which has been sitting in a still, quiet coma for more than a year, got prepped to go.
I took off the only personal data that was on it — a few documents sitting in a folder on the desktop and a few hundred photos of our kids that my wife had been importing for a while — and stuck them on a thumb drive. All that data took up just over a gigabyte, a fraction of what the tiny drive could hold. I copied the files to the Macbook and, in just a few minutes, the iBook now seemed dead to me; anything useful we’d had on it was strip-mined away. I used Disk Utility to wipe out the hard drive and reinstalled Mac OS Tiger on the computer.
Because we have a large office closet and attic, I’d been able to keep the original box, manuals, discs, even all the wires and plastic that the computer had arrived with. I cleaned the iBook’s case with a baby wipe (our house is full of baby wipes; when I bought the machine I don’t even know if I knew what a baby wipe was), took photos, packed up the machine and posted an online classified to sell it, carefully transcribing the computer specs from the box and including information about the missing F12 key and the battery. I carried the iBook in its box to the closet and left it there, where it’ll sit until there’s a buyer who might still want the laptop.
Then I moved on to my wife’s ancient Dell desktop computer, which has been unused for so long that I don’t even remember the last time its monitor had been connected to the thing. The machine was refurbished when we bought it at the Dell Factory Outlet (remember when that was an actual store?). At one time, it was going to be donated to be a group that rebuilds and redistributes PCs, but it’s so old that now it’s being donated for recycling. It’s about 12 years old and at one point years ago, maybe around 2007, I transferred my wife’s work documents to the desktop computer, which now runs Windows 7, that we share.
We had just started dating when she bought the refurbished Dell Dimension and I remember shopping with her, walking the wire-rack aisles, looking for a computer that she and her sister (then her roommate) could use. We put the components together at her apartment, the color-coded keyboard and mouse cables, the clunky speakers, all the beige you could imagine.
How could I have known that it would live with us for so many years, through marriage, through the births of our kids, somehow sneakily sticking around through generations of other computers and gadgets in the house?
I hauled its face, the heavy 15” CRT monitor, out of the closet, plugged all the scattered-on-the-floor pieces and waited (a long time) for the machine to boot up. I checked one last time to make sure there was nothing we needed, no forgotten file or images, no irreplaceable song or video. Nothing.
I stuck a disk utility program into the CD-ROM drive, rebooted the machine and watched it resuscitate into DOS. The hard drive was small; running the disk wipe, which overwrites all the drive’s data and then some, didn’t take long. I shut off the computer, packed up all the wires and peripherals, and put them in a corner of the room. I’ll need a big box, I thought to myself.
The compact, vertical desk where it sat for years and years was empty, full of giant empty compartments that won’t be filled again before we give the furniture away.
When I updated my wife on the machine and my intention to take it away, she didn’t seem to give it another thought. “You know, you could have done this at any time,” she chided me, “you didn’t have to wait this long.”
It’s true. I don’t know why I waited so long. Sometimes I get a little attached. The little rituals, the disk wipes, the unplugging, the stacking of outmoded parts in a corner of the room, they’re all parts of saying goodbye, the steps you have to take to extract something digital from your life.
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By James
June 27, 2011 7:22 PM | Link to this
It really takes very little computer to do simple things like word processing and older games. Maybe some kids will play Doom on your veteran machine.