Articles and Books

Letting Go Of Old Tech

We’ve all got a box sitting around somewhere, full of cables and devices that used to blink away at us until we snuffed the life out of it all by replacing it. Some of us have 10 of those, full of tangled cables that maybe went to that one camera that we lost in 2009. Many of us remember the exact price we paid for each device in those boxes, such as that $699.99 firewall. It can be challenging to replace that device with one that costs 10% of that price, even though it’s more than ample to meet our needs. And we have a hard time imagining that after only using the thing for 6 years that it’s now out-of-date. After all, don’t I still have that one sweater I bought during my freshman year of college? Won’t I need that laptop I replaced 3 years ago?

Chances are that you should burn that sweater and send the firewall and old laptop off for recycling. Of course, always make sure that you won’t be losing some data and have a backup of anything you’re getting rid of (that stored files), but chances are that some of that old stuff is completely incompatible with modern systems. Some things you should also consider throwing out:

  • That old tape drive that has the backups from your server from 10 years ago.
  • All those cables with pins in them. These days, HDMI, Lightning, USB, and Thunderbolt has completely replaced cables that have pins that get bent. They were great when the industry was young, but if you’re tossing things out, get rid of those old things…
  • Old monitors. Yes, that 15-inch LCD cost you $500. No, you don’t have any devices that use the kind of cable that connects it to a computer.
  • Old hubs, switches, cable modems, wireless access points, and firewalls. These days, most things are wireless. If you have a bunch of old devices that connected various Ethernet-based systems sitting around, toss ‘em. If you need to buy a new one, it will be super-cheap, and putting an old one on your network is likely to cause poor performance, network-wide. Old network appliances can also conflict with the addressing used on newer devices, and can cause outages.
  • Old printers and scanners. These days, you might go months without printing, and like old cars that haven’t been driven in forever, they might require a mechanic to get working. Printers are $50 at Target. Ink costs more these days. When a printer has a problem, give it a good clean, and if the problem persists, recycle!
  • Apps that charge you a recurring fee. Yup, these don’t fit in that plastic bin with the wires, but they cost you money. Likely every month. Everything from cloud services you tested to in app purchases that are billing monthly should be reviewed and cancelled if no longer needed.

Just toss all of it out. It will feel liberating to do so, and you’ll free up those plastic bins for other more useful stuff, like those VHS tapes of the Golden Girls!