A basement rescue

Last weekend I rescued an old friend. She was once popular and even trendy, but for the past couple of years she had been living alone in a basement. She looked good despite a growing collection of dust.

The rescue made both of us feel good, especially since I was able to put her to work.

You may have an old computer or two, stored away in a closet, basement or attic. I understand since I often do the same thing myself but — in truth — it’s sort of dumb. Most often it’s just a computer purgatory, a stop on the way to the final destination of the junk heap.
There are better ways and we’ll talk about that today.

For one thing, you can always give the computer away. Here in Atlanta, there’s an outfit called Computers for Youth. If you go to this Web page —- http://www.cfy.org/donate-computers.php — you’ll see the kind of computers it accepts. You can also read about the goals of the group. A quick search with Google with the search terms “donate computer” will help you find other groups no matter where you live.

If you decide to donate a computer, that’s a fine and generous thing. Over the years I’ve donated — either to groups or to individuals — at least six computers.

But in some cases, you may also be able to put one of those old computers to work right in your home. That’s what I did with my basement rescue. It now serves as a helper in my ham radio room, keeping track of contacts I’ve made and looking up locations of the other radio operators I visit with on the air. Taking a wild guess here most of you won’t be doing that.

But there are plenty of more ordinary uses for an aging and underpowered computer. I’ll give you some examples.

In my home, both my wife and I love to cook. Most of our recipes are scrawled on slips of paper. My chili recipe, for instance, is gradually disappearing under a coating of chili powder and cumin. Any working computer — no matter how old — would do a great job as a kitchen computer. Besides storing recipes it could also help when you need to pare down a recipe meant to serve four when you need to prepare it for six. Or, it could keep inventories of what you have on hand and then create shopping lists. With wireless access to the Internet, it can send those lists to a printer on your network, or roam the Net to hunt up new recipes.

The kitchen — with its steam, water and grease — isn’t the most hospitable location for a computer so you should locate it well out of the line of fire and also make sure that it’s connected to a outlet with ground fault protection (nowadays most bathroom and kitchen outlets have that protection, just be sure). Most office supply stores also sell plastic dust covers for computers and that’s an excellent idea for a kitchen computer.

If the computer eventually breaks down because of the environment, well you haven’t lost much — especially if you’re able to connect it to a network so that your recipes are stored away in another location.

Another great use for an aging computer is as a guest and kid machine. That way your own information is safe from prying eyes or careless use. If it breaks, well — again — you haven’t lost much.

My uncle, an electrical engineeer who spent part of his career working on operating systems, keeps one computer isolated from his home network. Information stored there is completely safe from hackers. And if a destructive virus or worm slips by his protection, the computer in isolation hums on with no problem. So it becomes a storage point for financial records and sensitive material. Properly backed up, it does a great job. In most cases, your old computer can do that just fine.

A more recent computer with a large hard disk could even sure as an online backup server. In many cases, that’s asking too much from an antique. It all depends on what you have on hand.
The great thing about all this is that — by letting an old machine share part of the computer load in your home — you are freeing up your best computers for the most important work like killing space aliens and playing online canasta.