throwing out old electronics

If some electronic I own works, does the job it's supposed to do and isn't wrecked, I hang on to it; this is why I still have a pair of small Radio Shack calculators (originally from a 3-pack, cat. no 65-1009 for those interested). These things are probably 25 years old if not older and could be late '90s models for all I know. The only thing each needed was one battery replacement. Both of them look almost new and still work perfectly.

Some people get bit by the nostalgia bug with old broken electronics, but I don't. I prefer the electronics in my life to not just work but also be functional, usable, practical, and reliable. If an electronic I have doesn't meet those conditions, even if it's in good condition, it gets thrown out.

Such is the case with four Garmin screens I just binned. A gray-sticker serial Garmin nuvi 200, a gray-sticker serial Garmin nuvi 250W, Garmin StreetPilot i3, and Garmin StreetPilot i5. All of those are in the trash because none of them can acquire a GPS signal quickly anymore, which makes them completely unusable. And what mean by quickly is a GPS signal acquired and ready-to-use in under 2 minutes. For any one of those four screens, the wait time for possibly acquiring a GPS signal is 20 minutes to an hour, and that's not an exaggeration. In comparison, my Garmin Drive 53 has a GPS signal acquired, locked and ready-to-use in around 20 seconds, and that's if it's having a bad day. It's usually the case where the GPS signal is acquired and ready in fewer than 10 seconds after power-on.

I also just threw out a laptop that was given to me some time ago, a purple HP Stream back from the Windows 8 era. It was in great shape, but the problem was that the primary storage was soldered to the board and only 4GB. Not upgradable at all. Yeah, I could technically install a small Linux distro on it like a minimal Xubuntu or something smaller, but it's not worth the bother since the on-board video could barely play full screen 720p video, never mind 1080p. It is a shame because the laptop was only lightly used with a great monitor that was easy on the eyes, but it's slow, can't be upgraded, can't even be used as a media player, so... in the trash it went. A lot of laptops from years ago can be saved and repurposed with a lightweight Linux, but not that one.

And I also just binned an 8GB microSD memory card. I beat the crap out of that thing with a ton of file writes and it started spitting back file copy errors, so in the trash that went. While I am very well aware how much microSD cards are at the moment, I was okay binning that one because I have a small pile of barely-used 32GB's I've acquired over the years (they were all for Garmin screens) that are kept in a static-free bag.

Broken electronics crap is definitely something I don't need in my life, and I'm not afraid to throw stuff out when it breaks or just stops working.