Keep that old hardware in a safe place!

[AJerman]

Haha, well, any self respecting computer nerd has a closet full of random old computer parts and I'm no different. I, along with many other Marvell Yukon (88E8001) users, have been dealing with not having any network on OS X. Well last night I booted back into OS X after being in Windows and forgetting about things I had plugged in for Windows, and left my USB bluetooth dongle in. I never really thought twice about the Bluetooth in OS X since the dongle was made by Microsoft, however when I booted into OS X, it found it and configured it without any fuss at all. Suddenly I had a brainstorm and knew it was kind of tricky but I wanted to find the second bluetooth dongle to see if I could get network running over it. This brought me into the closet digging through boxes. Well, I couldn't find it, but on my way out of the closet, I literally stepped on an old 3Com (3C900B) network card and thought "Hello, this might work". Plugged it in, OS X picked it up natively, and now I've got network.

 

So that's just one more reason why you should always keep your old hardware in a safe place

[Swad]

Haha...

 

Indeed - even though it might mean sacrificing socal life for days at a time while working on a computer issue, it's quite exciting to be a geek! You never know when you'll have those "Eureka!" moments.

[Metrogirl]

Those boxes of bits are really useful! That's a great story, AJerman, and a good reason to hang on to the bits that others would throw away...

 

When we were looking for some DIMMS that we "knew we had in the basement somewhere" we found we had enough assorted parts to put together a working PII 450 and load up W98. So we did. Why? I really have no idea, maybe we just wanted a retro-experience or something. That and we'd enjoyed several beers during the evening. Yes, OK, I suppose my SO and I are part-time geeks too. Oh, dear. And I try hard to avoid that label!