Death of the CRT

I look around my computer collection and what do I got the most of? Old CRT(Cathode Ray Tube) monitors. Many are still in working order. I tend to be of the type if it still works I hate to part with it. They range from 15" ones to a small television sized 19" one which weighs a ton. Great picture but it's just too bulky for my desk. What exactly can you do with them? If you try and sell them on Ebay nobody wants them and they'd cost an arm and a leg if you were to ship them anywhere(if anyone was crazy enough to buy one). If you look around on Craigslist they practically give them away. You can see them on the side of the road put out by someone else begging people to take them. All the monitors I've got were hand me downs or freebies. The only one I ever bought came with our original Gateway eight or nine years ago. Let's face it they are gone by the way of the floppy disk( Yes I still have them too though I can't remember when I actually used one last.).

Slowly fading away in favor of LCD type of monitors which are sleeker, lighter and are coming down in price every day. Ironically I got my first LCD monitor by the side of the road one day for free. I love it. It's freed up so much desk space. My flimsy computer desktop was bending from the weight of 19" Compaq monitor I had. The now sad and rejected behemoth monitor sits on my work table awaiting it's fate. I feel it looks at me begging for just one more chance at redemption.

Now as I'm writing this on the hand me down LCD monitor I wonder what to do with all the monitors I've got. I think another trip the old computer collection at the local landfill has about once a month is in order. At least to rid me of the ones that don't work. I still can't part with the ones that work though. It's a sickness I know. I know if I saw another by the side of the road I'd pick it up and the circle would start again. Just some thoughts I had for today. Thanks for coming by.

The castaways

HP Pavilion a705w

It's amazing what people throw away. A few weeks ago a friend of mine spots a PC tower outside to go to the trash. Being a computer guy he picks it up. He thought it look fairly new and worth checking out. He asked me if I was interested and I said sure. So I check it out and it's a HP Pavilion a705w in a little rough shape but not too bad. At first it didn't work but I soon breathed new life into it. Everything was there hard drive,dvd drive,CPU and so on. After I got it running of course I cleaned it out of the previous owners stuff. Yes they had left it with stuff on there. Very careless of them. Of course it was loaded with virus's and spyware and some really horrible pictures of early teen girls wanting to be tough rappers. Kind of sad but anyway. Not a bad machine with a 2.93Ghz Intel Celeron, 256mb RAM, 40Gb drive,DVD/Cd combo and Windows XP Home. Maybe be not a blazing machine but actually better than what I had.

eMachine 15" e15Tr LCD monitor

The second part of the story is that yesterday coming home from work I drive by a house and see a LCD monitor sitting against a fence. I turn around and pick it up. I thought what the heck if it doesn't work I lose nothing. It's 15 " eMachines LCD e15Tr monitor. It was missing the power cord so I substituted my wife's laptop plug and it worked. It's got some lite scratch's on the housing but the screen looks in good condition(that's what counts anyway). So now I've got an almost complete computer setup for zero dollars. Like I said it's amazing what people throw away.

I do plan on upgrading the HP with more RAM(up to 2Gb), video card and larger drive in the future. Now I just got to reconfigure my work area to accommodate it. It made my weekend.

References: HP Pavilion a705w
eMachine 15" Monitor e15T (Specs, Manual)