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I don’t know about you, but I’m a guy who fancies himself fairly savvy when it comes to resisting the Pavlovian lure of consumerism; I can walk through a mall for two hours without purchasing a single thing, flip through a copy of Skymall without once imagining one of its products enhancing my life and feel no urge to open my wallet when I hear Christmas music. There is one siren song, however, that I can’t resist: that of the shiny, new (likely Apple-branded) electronic gadget.
For instance: my phone is fine. I have seven months left on my Sprint plan. Yet I find myself lingering over apple.com/iphone, imagining what my life would be like if I could surf YouTube from anywhere I wanted. At this rate, before long I’ll have two or three old cellphones I couldn’t bring myself to throw away moldering in drawers, along with a Palm Pilot or two, at least one portable video game system, an old CRT monitor, a 486 PC from 1994, a 40gb hard drive, and God knows what else. And the pile just keeps getting bigger.
LifeHacker, however, has heard my plight (and that of my wallet), and has a number of suggestions for the chronic e-waster. Namely, ways in which you can recycle, revamp and reuse your old devices without having to throw them away or buy new ones. For instance:
• Before you toss that old iPod into a drawer in favor of a shiny new Touch or Nano, check out this list of handy iPod applications that just might breathe a little added functionality into your trusty old jogging partner you didn’t realize it had. (Hey, it’s given you so much, it’s time to give back.)
• Convert your old wireless router into a communications powerhouse by installing this Linux firmware — it’ll boost your WiFi signal bigtime, giving you expensive router performance at no added cost.
• Instead of buying a new computer — which I’m lamentably tempted to do every time my current Mac takes too long to load Photoshop or runs out of hard drive space — try a few simple things first.
- Add hard drive space. Running out of space is the number one complaint given by people who go looking for a new computer, but hard drive space is getting cheaper all the time. You can buy an external drive on the cheap, or an internal drive for even less and install it yourself.
- Upgrade your RAM. More RAM — and faster RAM — can mean dramatic improvements in system speed you never imagined possible. Try it before you ditch the old compy.
- Make more room on your hard drive. The number one computer mistake I see people making — even extremely computer-savvy 3D animator friends of mine, among others — is running their hard drives at near-capacity. Your system will run faster if you’ve got 10% or so of your hard drive freed up.
Anybody got any tips on how to solve the biggest problem — resisting the lure of the new and shiny?
Comments (9)
Comment
Just tell yourself that you aren’t going to buy it until there is a refurbished one available.
Even if you don’t buy the refurb one, you will have waited long enough for the hard marketing to have subsided and it won’t be all shiny and new. At that point, you will be able to tell if you REALLY needed it, or if it was just marketing.
posted by Moon on 12-17-2007 at 8:45 am
Have yourself some children.
It’ll be a race to see what you lose faster-the disposable income used to purchase the fun stuff -or- the free time you once had to actually use the fun stuff. ;)
posted by mrs.djs on 12-17-2007 at 8:56 am
The siren song of the Shiny New Computer is being awfully compelling this year, especially when I ended up at the 3-story Apple Store in NYC this weekend. What didn’t help is that one of my machines is currently having some serious motherboard issues, something that having a new hard drive or emptying space or adding RAM will do absolutely nothing about.
Our family has yet to dispose of any of our computers, though we tend to play ‘hand me down’ when kids from college get new machines and then pass them up the family tree. Despite this, we’ve got a garage full of computer history - there’s a Commodore 64, a Macintosh LC, a Performa, and a middle end Frankenstein PowerMac from 1997 that was my parents’ main computer up until a month ago (they now are setting up a brand new iMac).
My brother actually likes to refurbish old computers and turn them into useful gadgets like digital music players, virtual picture frames, and he said he saw an idea to turn one into an aquarium.
posted by Katherine on 12-17-2007 at 9:05 am
I have a slight contrarian view on all this waste business. Once we are smart enough (50 years?) to create robots that can sift through our garbage dumps and extract all the valuable stuff 7×24x365, my prediction is that our current dumps will become virtual “gold mines”.
posted by RobertSeattle on 12-17-2007 at 9:29 am
You know, I always thought that if some of the more impoverished areas in the world could just adopt some older technologies (like Windows 3.1) then we could just donate all of our old hardware and then instead of not having any computers at all they would have tech that was just 5-10 years old.
I once looked up charity donations for PCs, and their minimum requirement for a donation was basically a brand new PC.
posted by Dave on 12-17-2007 at 10:01 am
I’m with RobertSeattle’s view. For example, several months ago there was hype about how we’re ‘running out of copper’, which is bunk. With the exception of any that we’ve blasted into space, it’s all still here — just harder and more expensive to get to.
posted by EV on 12-17-2007 at 11:22 am
I resist by not looking. Okay the commercials are hard to avoid but I never go to Best Buy just to look around. Of course, my crack is art supplies. I feel guilty about how many trees are on my studio table.
posted by Amy on 12-17-2007 at 4:06 pm
WAIT.
Insist on waiting for the latest version of the device, and then if there is not an update, don’t think of buying it.
Oh yeah, if it looks interesting, try stepping into a P.I.’s shoes an investigation, see if it really is worth your money.
posted by Marcus on 12-17-2007 at 5:57 pm
My wife says I too generate too much e-waste. But, I argue, I’m not the one generating it; I usually pick up my silicon crack second-hand, spiff it up, use it until I can’t fix it, then toss it. I’m my own recycler shop.
But then there’s the stuff that I don’t use but don’t have the heart to get rid of. Like the first Mac SE I bought in 1993, and the Color Classic I rescued from a dumpster (still works flawlessly), and the 68000 dash 30fx I rescued from the recycler… I could go on. Is it really helping anything by keeping it out of the dump but in my basement? My wife doesn’t think so.
posted by Another Dave on 12-17-2007 at 11:10 pm