Firstly should I bring it to the BBQ? Next we need more stuff. The absolute best thing for the hardware library is RAM. This is because adding RAM is a really quick and easy way of making an old system usable again and also because RAM is small and light. ECC RAM for servers would be good too, but please label it really clearly (otherwise it will be mistaken for broken non-ECC RAM and discarded). The minimum speed of RAM that's useful would be DDR-333 AKA PC-2700 and the minimum size is 512M DIMMs, adding small DIMMs isn't a good option because motherboards don't have enough sockets.
RAM that is DDR2-533 AKA PC2-4200 or faster is extremely useful, there's a heap of old Core2 Duo and Pentium-D systems out there that can be useful again with some of that. Laptop RAM is REALLY useful, not only because of old laptops needing an upgrade but because printers often take laptop RAM. PCIe expansion cards would be good. PCIe has been out for long enough that surely someone has some old stuff that they don't use. A collection of spare PCIe video cards would be handy and PCIe Ethernet cards would be really good. USB flash storage sticks are also useful and small. If you have some 32M and 64M sticks that you don't use then please donate them (after securely erasing them). One use for those is for MP3 files for car music systems which often don't have a suitable UI for changing albums other than removing one USB stick and inserting another. The Kia Cerato is one vehicle that really benefits from such use. SATA disks are useful. Probably a couple of 40G disks for systems that don't need much storage would be handy to have and some disks >100G for more serious use. As 3TiB disks are cheap nowadays there should be some unused 300G disks out there. SAS disks are really useful as some servers don't work properly with SATA disks. Even small disks can be good, a pair of 36G SAS disks can make for a really useful server. Note that I won't be bringing a lot of disks to meetings. So anyone who wants disks should email me a day or two before the meeting with a request. The same goes for DVD drives. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/ _______________________________________________ luv-main mailing list [email protected] http://lists.luv.asn.au/listinfo/luv-main
