Re: spring clean out
Posted: Thu Jun 11, 2020 5:45 pm
If I ain’t used it or wore it in the last two years, out it goes!!
But not the wife.
But not the wife.
One of my sidelines is vintage computer repair and restoration. Most Windows users do not bother to encrypt any of their files, and it is astonishingly easy to recover data from these systems, even if Windows is "password protected" or so corrupted as to be unusable.nworbekim wrote:i have pulled all the hard drives from the old computers and i was looking for a way to delete the data... i can't remember what's there, but i'm sure passwords and accounts would be available if someone were smart enough to get into them...
a little research tells me a good way is to take them to the drill press and put a few holes through them... those little fellers are TOUGH!!! i put 3 in each one.
i don't know if anyone would take time to go thru a dump to find stuff like that, but one never knows...
Check eBay Sold Item listings and you will be shocked at what the Color Computer 3 and Atari ST sell for these days. The other Color Computers also fetch surprisingly strong values, as do many of the Program Pak cartridges.nworbekim wrote:That's one reason I never sell old computers... Just store them. These went back to the 90's... I pulled the drives and drilled them. I can't think they'd be readable. I have a half dozen more that I want to look at before I drill. I bought an interface that allows several different versions of HD's to be attached via USB. I used to be a file swapper and have tons of stuff from the pirate cove...
Vintage computer repair and restorer... I just tossed 2 big boxes of 80/90's Tandy Color computer I & II and maybe a III with peripherals... And a couple of Atari ST's with peripherals. One of the Coco's was a gray. It was a 16K computer when I bought it and I upgraded it myself to 64K. That kicked off my 30 year hobby as a computer hardware hacker. I did really almost shed a tear for that one... But I let it go.
I wondered if those would be valuable to someone. I can still go pull them out but I think my wife would kill me. I still kept an MC10 back. I have an original IBM pc green screen display I'm going to keep back.
Is there any value in software for the vintage computers? I tossed several hundred 3.5 floppy disks, i noticed a set of win 3.1 and 95 disks. Foxpro, gosh, I don't know what all...