Pieces and Parts.....

[Kitsune]

At various levels, many of us on the board put their own computers together. As such, we tend to collect various components. I have a whole bunch of IDE ribbon cables, for example.

What "Pieces and Parts" have you ended up collecting?

[Joviwan]

Just in the pull drawer in front of me, I have... A pair of USB printer cables, Mini-jack to left-right RCA converters, a gold plated coax cable, an IDE floppy band, an Rx bottle filled with hard drive and case screws, a 12 volt 300 mA AC adapter... Mini-USB to USB 2.0 cable... screw driver... Oh, and a mini-jack extender.

In my 'spare parts' boxes, I've got motherboards, processors, GPU's, power supplies, mice, keyboards, an unsoldered Xbox mod chip (borked), my old Hercules Fortissimo 2 sound board, and a mash of cables denying all sorts of name and description. Oh, and a flat panel monitor.

[General Zod]

I have a bunch of ethernet and USB cables lying around.

[Comando293]

I have a video card in my parts box, along with a very old hd (less than a gig of space!). I also have a wireless card that fits PCI slots.

For cables, I have and IDE cable, several SATA cables, a few power cables in various sizes, and huge box of Firewire, USB, RCA and S-Video cables.

[FSTargetDrone]

2 or 3 NICs, lots of ethernet cables, half a dozen drives of various sizes, 2 wireless cards, portable floppy drive, 3 or 4 keyboards (none has yet been the equal of the keyboard from my 1995 Compaq 978CDTV, a keyboard I still use with my main system) a Hercules sound card and its rack-mountable external box (with cable), an old ZIP 100 external drive (the kind that used a passthrough cable to hook up via the printer port), a ZIP 100 internal drive, a pair of less than fully functional optical mice, a scanner I haven't used in at least 4 years, a Microsoft Sidewinder 3D PRO stick of joy, a couple of DSL line filters and a box of floppies around somewhere. Also a cable to hook up a computer to our HDTV. A thing of hard drive screws. A few drive cables. Whatnot and such.

That's all I can think of without looking in my home office which is in the other room.

EDIT:

The light of day reveals a pair of CD burners, another pair of DVD burners, as well as an old CD-ROM drive I forgot about.

It seems over the years, I've gone through a surprising amount of CD and DVD burners. None of them seemed to have lasted very long, never giving me solid performance and relaibly burning dics. However, the ASUS DVD burner I use now works just fine. It's lasted well over a year and that is a record. I don't think it's made more than 2 or 3 coasters out of a hundred or so burn attempts.

And I have all of my old, (mostly) complete computers in storage. I never throw anything away.

Edit

Also 4 or 5 video cards, including a pair of Monster something or other that were used in SLI in tandem with another card.

[The_Saint]

*starts taking stock of what's on shelves, in the cupboards and generally all around me* errrmmmm I'm scared...

several computer tower and desktop cases, "most" of a small rack unit, several old disc drives, several floppy drives (3.5 and 5.25), mainboards, network cards (for almost every networking standard I can think of), a box of assorted usb, firewire, ide, sata, serial, parallel cables (and some others for which I'm not exactly sure of their history or use), a box of "standards converters": usb/firewire to sata/ide gadget, usb to playstation controllers, usb - firewire - PS/2 - Din - serial - ethernet - PC Card - infra red - bluetooth adapter dongles... CRT monitors are kept elsewhere... they're just too bulky...

[Kitsune]

Just recently threw away a couple of boxes of floppies.....have not used them in years and nothing appeared to be important on any of them.

[Starglider]

I have four plastic crates full to the brim with assorted network, power, audio and video cables.

I tend to toss internal parts that I don't have an immediate use for, but I do have a stack of 10 old Opteron processors, as a desk ornament I suppose. I also have a PowerMac G4 that I haven't touched since 2006, but keep around for historical value (I guess, along with the Amiga 1200). At the office I have some moderately old machines I keep around as spares.

I used to have several old keyboards around - in particular I liked the big clicky keyboards that came with a pair of original Dell Xeon workstations I picked up second hand in the late 90s (similar to the model M but nicer). I only got rid of those this year when I bought three Deck Legends (one red, one green, one blue - they're great keyboards).

Finally I have a couple of Lian Li Legacy cases (one silver, one black), four Zalman Reserator Ones and two 1000W Zalman Heatpipe-cooled power supplies, which have been sitting about unused for 6 to 12 months. These are for a pair of workstations I intend to build as soon as the Nehalem chips and 'Skulltrail 2' boards are available - I've been picking up non-performance parts that I like the look of but which were about to be discontinued.

[phongn]

I'm not a huge fan of those lighted keyboards, though a few other companies are using those Cherry microswitches now (in particular, the Das Keyboard people). I personally have a Model M descendant with built-in trackpoint for my desktop.

Somewhere around here I have an old Slot A 700MHz Athlon.

[Bounty]

I'm a notebook person so I don't have many spares around. Two mice, a Bluetooth adaptor, network cables, a router, couple of antennas, USB sticks, USB cables, and a few odds and ends I can't immediately identify.

I've got a junker desktop coming in soon if all goes to plan; maybe then I'll have some real nerd cred junk.

[Darth Nostril]

A couple of plastic storage boxes jammed full with just about every kind of cable you can think of, several old cases stuffed in the cupboard that I keep meaning to strip down so I can recycle the steel frames & plastic trimmings, four 19" CRT monitors haphazardly stacked up in the spare room, the drawers of the storage units behind me are filled with pretty much everything - old cd drives & dvd burners, RAM sticks, CPUs & heatsinks, old 200-300W PSUs, motherboards, graphics cards ranging from TNT & Permedia to Geforce2 (found a Voodoo 2 buried under a bunch of daughterboard addons the other day), various soundcards, NICs, modems, a pile of hard drives (actually going to keep and use these - got an external hot swappable caddy, use the HDs like oversized floppies), lots of dead or damaged keyboards & mice, microphones & webcams and my Saitek Cyborg stick of joy
Oh and a laptop, an old Toshiba from work, originally intended to use it to be able to browse the net whilst lounging in the sun out on the lawn. Didn't work a) because it's pretty much rained constantly for the past two years and b) because the thick stone walls of this house block the wireless signal.

I'm a bit of a pack rat, can't bear to throw anything away just in case.

Been thinking about assembling a system out of the spare parts, did it before to build this Athlon 2800 based system as a browsing machine & keep my CG rig offline, only this time I'd be building a retro gaming system

[Kitsune]

Just recovered a Sempron Motherboard and Processor along with 512 in Ram (2 x 256), and an 80 Gig SATA drive.......The case was destroyed with no power supply, CD Rom, or video cards but all of the hardware worked when I tested them......The 80 Gig SATA was a life safer because I was down to 15 gigs on my hard drive.