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| Spring Cleaning 2019 | Posted in pix and tek on March 31, 2019 |
For most people, spring cleaning is a time to clean out and refresh your house, getting rid of all that junk that's cluttering up your spaces. But for people like me, it's a great time to find cool stuff by digging through random peoples trash! You know what they say, "one man's trash is another man's... trash!"
Normally, I don't find that much, but this year I think I just blew all of my luck in one season.
The first thing I found this year was this Celeron based Windows XP computer. I know some of you are going "eewwww" right now, but ANY computer is a good find to me.
It seems like this computer was most likely used by an older couple. First of all, there's 5 years of TurboTax shortcuts just on the desktop, along with HomeWorks and Spider Solitaire. In the documents folder was nothing but endless recipies, my favourite being PECAN PIE.RTF
As you can see from the right pic, it's a pretty simple build. I think I had already removed some components by the time that picture was taken. I ended up parting this one out, because all the caps on the motherboard were exploded (and yes it still worked, but barely). I still got a bunch of useful parts out of it, so still a good find overall.
The next find of the year was something I was not expecting.
I was at home, and my brother told me that there was some VHS tapes at a house down the street, and he was gonna go out in a minute, so after he left, I went to said house.
It was like VHS heaven there, too many tapes to even count! I have limited space, and not a huge interest in pre-recorded tapes, so I went straight to digging for potentional TV recorded treasures. I found 10 recorded tapes, but they just turned out to be bootleg transfers. Bummer.
After maybe 30 minutes, I went back to the same house again, and I was looking through the rest of what he had out. I was moving some boxes and stuff, when the homeowner walked out and asked me what I was doing.
I just told him that I was looking around for spring cleaning, and he noticed that I had pulled a few things out of the boxes
He was fine with me looking through the stuff, and he told me "alright, just don't make a mess, cause I don't want the garbage guys to come here and be like "WHAT THE FUCK!!!"". So, I agreed that I would clean up after myself.
After that, he threw a few more boxes on the pile. I opened one up and I couldn't beleive my eyes.
Inside that old, modly box was an entire, original Nintendo Entertainment System, complete with controllers, games, manuals, original boxes, ac adapters, and even birthday cards! The second box I opened had an entire SNES, complete with accessories as well! I opened the third and last box on the pile and it was full of more accessories, as well as tons of PC games, CDs and floppy disks, including a sealed copy of Phantasmagoria!
There were 3 heavy, moldy boxes of expensive retro videogame junk sitting right in front of me, and all I had was my bike. I didn't even have my bike trailer with me. I didn't live really far away, but there were lots of annoying scrappers rolling around the streets looking for any metal and electronics they can find, and I didn't want my consoles to be toast.
Using my large brain and fast thinking, I spotted a lawn spreader. I tied that broken, rusty lawn spreader to my bike, and stacked 3 heavy old boxes on top of it. Yeah. I carted home 4 modly boxes on a lawn spreader. It took like 30 minutes, cause the lawn spreader was broken, and boxes kept falling off, but I did it.
As I was going down the street, another treasure hunter said "Nice finds kid, did you get the bike?" and I responded with, "uhhh... the bike is mine. I was just taking home all these boxes."
pic of the stuff at my brother's place
And boy was it worth it! I gave all of it, except the PC games and accessories to my brother, since he's far more interested in game collecting than I am. Most of the stuff required some cleaning of course, but you might be asking, where are the consoles? Well, they needed a bit more attention.
Here's the NES. I don't know where it was stored to get like this, but as you can see it cleaned up alright. When testing it, I got the infamous blinking red light, which is usually because the pins on the cartridge and the slot on the console are, in this case, insanely dirty. I opened it up, did a full cleanup of the plastics, and since I didn't have a replacement cartridge slot to use with it, I just cleaned it up with alcohol, and used a pin to bend every pin up a little bit so that they make better contact with the cartridge. After that, I'd say it's a perfectly working NES!
And here's the SNES. And yes, I cleaned the whole thing. I just didn't take a photo of it. This one was truly beyond disgusting, but it actually worked perfectly first try, most likely thanks to its much better cartridge slot design. I did still go around and clean it up though, and it works great!
So there you have it, Spring Cleaning 2019. I'm excited for the future SCs, but I don't think any will stack up to these finds, but you never know!
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dvd3000 is just another netizen yelling into the void
this is my website! and where I've been collecting my internet happenings off and on since 2014.
just come on in and make yourself at home, and don't mind the mess..
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