On Halloween night I wasn’t out trick or treating, or handing out treats. Instead, I stayed up in my dimly lit room, blasting Slipknot on my speakers, and digging through the corpse of my parents’ 2001 Windows XP Dell desktop. The things I found in that PC…..I might as well have been digging up a fossil! The case even had a slot for a floppy disk – WHO STILL EVEN USES A FLOPPY DISK??? The insides and cable management of the desktop was decent, considering that it was prebuilt, however this computer had surely aged. Inside was 2 sticks of RAM yes, yet each was about 100mb giving us a total of 200mb of RAM. To put it into perspective , the standard nowadays is about 4GB. The CPU that I found inside was an Intel Pentium 4, first generation, with a single core. Again, to put it into perspective, most laptops and desktops a standard of 4-16 cores.
Now you may be asking “Sparsh why the heck are you listing out the contents for a fossil of a PC,” and the answer is simple: though this PC may be something from the prehistoric era, it’s got potential. Notice how I didn’t just throw it away in the trash and say “haha whatever you stupid windows XP dell,” I opened it up and assessed what I could do with it. What I’m getting at here, is that you shouldn’t be just toss out old computers, give them a chance! Later that night I went into my broken down laptop and salvaged parts that were undamaged, and put them into the rig. I basically played Frankenstein on the old PC, booted it up, and there we go! It worked perfectly as a normal everyday computer. Now as a gaming PC it was faaaaar behind performance wise, however these older vintage cases deliver a certain uniqueness to a person, which has compelled me to replace more parts with far more powerful hardware that I’ll order online. If it worked normal with a few little swaps from a junkyard laptop, then think of what it could be with powerful, up to date hardware built for high performance activities!
Every year, about 41 million computers, 100 million cell phones, and 20 million TV sets are thrown into landfills, simply because they’re outdated! All this “E-Waste” is so incredibly toxic and damaging to our environment, it takes up 70% of all the toxic waste that we dump into the world. It’s not even the world that’s suffering, it’s the people too. Workers on E-Waste sites are paid an average of $1.50 a day, unprotected in this risky environment filled with toxic fumes from the incinerated hardware. So next time you get the urge to toss out the old family computer, think again. Just because it’s obsolete doesn’t mean you have to toss it out!
Sources
SPARSH AIYAR
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SPARSH AIYAR#molongui-disabled-link
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SPARSH AIYAR#molongui-disabled-link
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SPARSH AIYAR#molongui-disabled-link
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SPARSH AIYAR#molongui-disabled-link
