Keeping what you want, knowing what you need

I’m not a pack rat, although some may say that after seeing my inside of my garage. But everything I save I some how know I will need it in the near future. What is the near future to me? It could be a few months or a few years. It’s not uncommon for me to have some thing “saved” in my garage that has been there for 6 years and I finally need it. But if I did not have that item saved, could I go out and get it, maybe, find it in an auction on eBay, maybe. I could pay a high price and have to wait a few days for it to get here, maybe. But why do you have to buy when you could have saved it, for free? Here is one good case and point. I have an IBM ThinkPad laptop computer; I have had it for over 8 years. It has Windows 98 installed on it. The processor speed is 500 MHz, pretty slow when you compare it to today’s laptops. For the past few years, it has just been a DVD player for my daughter on long road trips. Well it finally crashed; some of the hard drive files got corrupted. An average person would probably never have or use a computer that was over 8 years old, or even think about restoring it to working order. That’s not me. When I purchased the laptop I got a DVD drive and also a 1.44 floppy drive with it. The drives simply snap in to the laptop. Why would anyone even keep the 1.44 drive when they would only use the DVD drive? I did. I got the 1.44 drive off the shelf, snapped it in. I also found my saved windows 98 restore disk. I booted up the 1.44 drive with the restore disk and I fixed the hard drive. I replaced the 1.44 drive with the DVD drive and the laptop is good as new. The time to find the items I needed, took me less than 5 minutes, keep in mind that the items have been setting on the shelf for 8 years. If I would have had to buy them, I would still be waiting and be out some money.