I swapped printers the other day. Moved one from hither to thither. As I did, I opened the drawer where I keep printer manuals and discs. And in that drawer, I beheld a raft of old SIMMs — memory cards from computers long gone.

It was easy to purge the old printer stuff. Manuals and discs for printers I no longer own were tossed out without a thought. But the SIMMs? They’re difficult to get rid of.

Intrigued by my collection, I visited my computer boneyard and found even more SIMMs sitting on the shelf. Some of them are very, very old.

Figure 1. My collection of SIMMs.

Honestly, if I were to upgrade memory on one of my current systems (and I usually don’t have to because I always max out memory when I buy a computer), I’d probably buy new memory. In fact, I know I’d buy new memory. So, once again, why do I hang onto these old SIMMs?

One of my Facebook friends, Robert, had this thought to offer:

It’s hard to throw away something that cost so much and is not broken.

Amen, brother!

In Figure 1, you’re probably looking at about $2,000 worth of computer memory. Granted, the total is only about 2GB of RAM. (One of those sticks is just 100MB.) Yet, I paid a lot. So why throw it out?

Well, one problem is that not every computer has the same memory slots.

Damn those manufacturers!

So you can’t really pull memory out of one computer and plug it into another. Even the same brand, same model of PC sometimes use different internal hardware. It sucks!

Looking forward (which is good), I think a visit to the boneyard is in order to toss out some other one-time expensive gizmos that I apparently hang onto for no reason.