Huge Dilemma (First world problems)

SPG

SPG

SPG

Soldato
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28 Jul 2010
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Somehow, I do not know its happened but the large plastic size box of cables has got out hand, A grand total of 4 medium plastic tubs full of cables ranging from 1983 upto now is taking up space in the loft. What do you do, be ruthless throw everything and be done with it or some how find a system to wither it down to one box.... Do i really need a serial port cable for printers, a RS232 to LAN... (what on earth i used that for is lost in the mist of times)

I am off for a lie down now.... Cables are such a PITA.
 
No, you'll never need any of them.

...unless you throw them out, then you'll need one of them the day after.
 
I sorted through mine a few months ago, it had gotten ridiculously out of hand, the box was one of those office moving things that companies use when they go pop and can no longer feed their staff so have to throw them out on the street to be homeless and then their kids starve and have to wear second hand clothing to school and sleep on cardboard to keep warm.

Yeah, one of those. I kept one of each cable just in case and binned the rest. I now keep them in a smallish tupperware.
 
I'm terrible for this, but an impending house move is going to force my hand. There's just no way I need 10 spare kettle/ethernet/HDMI etc etc etc cables and moving with them is a bit of an organisational incompetence IMO.

Anyway, my system will be - as with all clearout activity - the 3 piles method. Keep, don't know, chuck. After the first round, put the 2 certain piles to one side, then revisit the don't know pile until everything is in one or the other. Be brutal and realistic and you shall find your way to cleared out gloriousness.
 
Ditch anything for tech you no longer own. Coil each remaining cable, place in unsealed, labelled freezer bag, stack in box on end as you would vinyl records. Sorted.
 
I keep a box of cables up the attic, but I won't keep anything that old.

USB A, 3.5mm audio, optical, Cat 5/6 x1000, VGA, HDMI and displayport is what I actively keep. Anything else gets binned :p
 
I was fairly brutal with cables. My theory being that if you get to a point you need one, you can probably buy it for a quid on ebay at some point down the line.
 
When I last moved house, I realised I had a few boxes of cables that I hadn't used in years and they'd just followed me around from house to house. I was ruthless and binned the lot without even looking through them. My reasoning was that I probably hadn't touched them in a few years so obviously didn't need them.

My mum phoned me last week as she was clearing out some drawers. She'd found an old AM2 board and a Geforce 4 MX and wanted to know if she should keep them! :cry:
 
I was looking yesterday to find something to bodge up a 12v to 5v connection but all I had was leads for kettles.

I have a car 12v lead that needs to be dropped to 5v and I need a femail socket to fit the male pin -Can get loads for CCTV stuff but not minature 12v sockets -(I think it's more a panel socket I need) It fitted my snooper speed camera detector. New ones are 5v so USB B
So if you have one throw it my way.
:D
 
I have an alcove that's probably intended as a walk-in wardrobe. It's my "why am I keeping this?" store. A dozen IDE ribbon cables? FDD ribbon cables? A 486 CPU? An unknown number of CPU coolers for CPUs I no longer own and which haven't been made for decades? Dozens of blank CD-Rs? 20 year old graphics cards? FDDs? sub-GB HDDs? I know there's a 40MB HDD in there somewhere. No idea how many others or what capacity. Dozens of cables that I can't even remember what they were for? All that and more!

I did find a use for one of the things in there within the last couple of years. At some point I bought a box of 100 cable ties. There are probably about 80 left.

Maybe when I die the person who gets my house will find something in that alcove worth selling to a collector or a museum.
 
I have a fridge freezer in the garage full of cables and a large drawer down by the side of me is full of them.
Cables are also scattered around the house in plastic bags oh and two large bags full of stage cables in the garage.
There is also a cupboard behind me with the bottom full of cables.
My wife said that when I die she is having them all removed and my funeral song will be Cliff Richard Wired For Sound.
 
The PSU on my fiber router died the other day, digging through the box of cables revealed a perfect match so I had internet for the few days it took BT to send an engineer (I know - needs openreach to change a power supply) - Figure i've got at least another 5 years of justification out of it now :)
 
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