I’ve had a Dell XPS since 2005 and as a wedding present my now wife helped pay to have my rig upgraded. I know nothing about anything so I had a friend build my computer for me. I was able to scavenge my video card, sound card, and hard drive and bought a new processor, motherboard, case, and power supply.
So now I have a case, power supply, 4 gigs of RAM, motherboard and processor that I don’t know what to do yet. The sound card is built into the motherboard so all that would need to be added would be a graphics card and hard drive.
So what do I do with it? I don’t know enough about computers to do it by myself, and I don’t really need another computer than the awesome one I have now.
I put them in big labeled Tupperware-style containers on shelves, sorted into categories like Connectors, Cables, Drives, Modems, et cetera. Then I throw them away in about 5 years.
This strikes a chord. I have a stack of spare parts gathered over the years, most of which is now outdated and worthless. Last week I upgraded RAM in my desktop and instead od putting the old stuff away to use “some other day” I decided to get rid of it. My SO works in a large office and they have a desk there where people put items which may be of use to someone else (normally stuff like home grown fruit, old books, shopper dockets). So my old RAM went there- I don’t care if someone else takes it and doesn’t use it- it is out of our house.
If you’re lucky, you can cobble together spare parts into a new computer. I bought two computers in 2001. One broke, so I combined the two together into a new computer with two hard drives, a 3.5" floppy, a CD player, and a CD-R player.
However, when that computer broke in '06, I had to pretty much throw out everything since many of the parts weren’t being used anymore, e.g. AGP video cards.
If you aren’t computer savvy, I would recommend only keeping the drives. Anything that looks like a circuit board you might as well throw away.