What Can You Do with Old RAM? 90
sruchris asks: "Over the past 10 years or so, as friends and relatives buy new computers, I end up with the spare parts that they don't want. I've now have quite the collection of unused PC100 and PC133 SDRAM. Does anyone have any practical or creative uses for spare SDRAM other than giving it away? I have various sizes from 32MB to 256MB. My first thought was a giant RAM drive. Does anyone know of an adapter that would take, lets say, 10 sticks of SDRAM and give me an IDE or USB connector? I know people have made jewelery, fishtanks, litterboxes and furniture out of old computers parts, but what can we do that's pratical with a box full of old RAM?"
Re:I had 4 128M sticks sitting on my desk for a ye (Score:2)
Not exactly novel, unique, or groundbreaking, but you could sell to me cheap. :-)
Don't forget! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Don't forget! (Score:2)
Re:Don't forget! (Score:1)
i use a piece of string to tie on my keys since the ring was too stiff for my liking
Re:Don't forget! (Score:2)
Re:Don't forget! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Don't forget! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Don't forget! (Score:2, Funny)
That's why I hire someone to handle mine for me.
Re:Don't forget! (Score:3, Informative)
Obvious (Score:3, Funny)
You can post it as an "Ask Slashdot" and get your five minutes of geek fame!
Re:Obvious (Score:1)
Since the submitter appears to be bored with SDRAM, and I still have a machine which uses it, he should simply give it to me.
:-)
Gigabyte's i-RAM (Score:3, Informative)
Try Gigabyte's i-RAM:
Anandtech Review [anandtech.com]
4 slot, PCI, makes a great swap file drive for pshop or premiere.
Re:Gigabyte's i-RAM - DDR ONLY :( (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Gigabyte's i-RAM (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Gigabyte's i-RAM (Score:1)
Re:Gigabyte's i-RAM (Score:2)
http://www.geekstuff4u.com/product_info.php?manuf
Re:Gigabyte's i-RAM (Score:1)
Give them to me (or sell them) (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Give them to me (or sell them) (Score:2)
Re:Give them to me (or sell them) (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Give them to me (or sell them) (Score:1)
Find out what the people stripping the RAM out of old boxes are doing with it, and do that.
Or, just stop keeping hold of it yourself if it isn't worth anything to you.
Re:Give them to me (or sell them) (Score:4, Informative)
Remember that this stuff wasn't just used in desktop PCs, but also in a wide variety of special purpose systems. For example, I used to repair video servers, which were basically a PC with a crapload of custom hardware, and each one uses a bare minimum of 5 72-pin simms (max 11, IIRC). There are hundreds of these things still chugging along doing their jobs quite nicely, keeping broadcasters like DirecTV going, despite the fact that some of them are old enough to be running NT3 on a 486.
Somebody has a use for them, and you might as well collect a little beer money from it.
That said, the ramdrive idea is cool, but it get's mentioned every year or so and there don't seem to be many of them out there, especially ones that use older form factors. If I had the know-how, though, I'd make one. I'm not convinced it's as unreasonable as some around here would have us believe.
Re:Well... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Well... (Score:2)
Any toxins in em? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Any toxins in em? (Score:2)
But first, I'd max out my linux box with pc133, just to help speed it up.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Any toxins in em? (Score:2)
Re:Any toxins in em? (Score:2)
Re:Any toxins in em? (Score:1)
Oh, also, my water goes through a filtration process since I live in a city and not a little hick town. Then there's the home filtration process, too.
Re:Any toxins in em? (Score:1)
Re:Any toxins in em? (Score:1)
SDRAM Adapter (Score:1)
Sadly, the speed and I/O pins required to talk to even PC-100 SDRAM is out of the range of anything homebrew you could throw together. Unless you're some sort of FPGA master with a PC board factory in the backyard. Neat idea, but highly impractical.
So Ebay the SDRAM, buy some cheap DDR, and the Gigabyte card that's got DDR slots and a FPGA on it already.
(FPGA - Field Programable Gate Array [wikipedia.org])
freecycle (Score:5, Informative)
I found that via an old entry on http://www.makezine.org/blog/ [makezine.org].
There have times where I wished I had some older memory to fill out an old liquidated machine I was resurrecting, but I've always had spares of the smaller sized memory cards while wishing I had the larger capacity cards. That is and abundance of 128 MB cards that I would like to trade ALL for just one 256 MB card. The low end stuff of any generation of memory cards is basically useless in my experience.
Anybody want some 128 MB PC100 cards?
Re:freecycle (Score:2)
Be generous (Score:2)
Give them to me (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Give them to me (Score:2)
72 pin or 30 pin?
Re:Give them to me (Score:2)
UMMMM (Score:2)
Get rid of them?
LOL
Actually "recycling" the boards (Score:1)
Please mod
Wanna sell some of it? (Score:3, Informative)
You can email me at coastalnet.com
Keychain (Score:2)
We used to turn old 256k 30-pin SIMMs into keychains and give or sell them to customers. The hole on the side can hold a keyring. More popular among the ladies, since it meant the keys were easier to find in the purse, and gents didn't care for the sharp corners. We ground the corners off a few for ourselves, but never really found them convenient for our pocket keychains. I did put one on my auxiliary keychain, though.
Re:Keychain (Score:1)
Re:Keychain (Score:1)
Sharp corners are useful (Score:1)
Send PC100 RAM to us... We still use it! (Score:2, Informative)
like the one we put into a returned soldiers'
rehab centre in South Australia, cost-free.
We've got some Compaq Deskpro's that work fine
in that application... they take PC100 SDRAM.
Adding more RAM makes our servers go faster;
each of these boxes have room for 3 RAM modules.
If you were going to dump them, dump them here:
GPO Box 222, Adelaide 5001, AUSTRALIA
TIA
Donate them to a school (Score:2, Informative)
The lack of budget isn'
Use if for a utility box (Score:2)
On a less serious note, you could tape it to your fingers and you'd have nine inch nails.
Hand-me-downs (Score:3, Insightful)
Xmas Ornament (Score:1)
--
John C
Re:Xmas Ornament (Score:2)
Sell them (Score:2)
LTSP (Score:4, Funny)
I dream of the day I have a toilet PC, but there's still a few logistical challenges to work out (e.g. mounting the screen behind the door, storing the optical mouse somewhere, choice of keyboard), as well as the all important "Can I find a printer that prints on a roll of toilet paper?". You may laugh, but once I've got mine, everyone's gonna want one!
Re:LTSP (Score:1)
Re:LTSP (Score:2)
Mostly I used that machine so I could sit in th
Coaster (Score:1)
Sell on Allegro. (Score:3, Informative)
In Poland, 128, 256, 512M SDRAMs run at prices high enough to exchange them for DDR400 equivalents with lifetime warranty.
These chips are what allows older computers - P2, P3 - to run smoothly and be usable in modern world. Used computer salesmen battle for them - because P3 600MHZ with 512M RAM will run faster than P4 2GHZ with 128M - which still is a common config available from retailers. Giving more RAM to the old boxes gives them a new lease of life and allows them to serve poorer people for many years. You can have such a computer, complete set, for $30, $50 - and it's more than enough for websurfing and home office, accounting etc. Only games require more.
Battery backed SDRAM? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's usually not much of a problem to find motherboards and power supplies to go along with your ram. The problem really becomes energy consumption. Yeah, you can take out the drives (and everything else), and leave just the mobo, power supply, fan, and memory, but that's still going to eat up too much power unless you've got a good use for the extra ram.
I got to thinking after reading this: what about using a battery-backed SDRAM module? This way you could keep the computer off, but the data would stay in ram. I'm not really sure how useful it'd be in itself, but apparently these things come as PCI cards so maybe they'll help. Here are some links I found in a quick google search: http://www.bentech-taiwan.com/memory_board.htm [bentech-taiwan.com], http://www.vita.com/vmeprod/pmc/pmcmemory.shtml [vita.com]
Anyway, for most purposes I think just using a regular old motherboard will do. The issue is can you find a use for the ram which is more valuable than the cost of the electricity? For smaller bits of ram, I'm not so sure about that.
Keychains (Score:2)
Re:I've been wondering the same thing lately. (Score:2)
72 pin PC133? Okay, maybe. There were a few Slot One motherboards with SIMM sockets.
30 pin 128 MegaByte sticks? You must have had them custom made by hand for almost as much as they would have cost back in the 386 days if it had
Keychain (Score:2)
Donate it (Score:2)
Memory == Power usage (Score:2)
Overclocking (Score:1)
Since simm (Score:2)