Clearing up isn't hard to do.

But chucking stuff out is difficult sometimes.

I've just been through the CDs to tidy stuff up so we can clear a room. The Music CDs are fine - there's a couple that I could 'lose' but mostly it's great music.

Then there are PC CDs.

I used to LOVE the free software that came on PC mags, when home computing was still something of a novelty and the WWW ran at 33Kbps. Then everything you wanted to download took 20 mins, 30 mins, sometimes a couple of hours! So the magazine CDs were THE way to try new software, get the latest patches, drivers, updates etc etc. Fantastic.

Looking at the piles of CDs now, I hate to thing how much money that represents, between '98 and '02. In some ways it was good value: I got paid a small stipend for providing IT support in that period to the company, as I'd often do it outside hours (and it let me use the name Turtle I T Services). When we were acquired in 2002, TITS was let go and that coincided with a decreased interest in computing and refocus on hardware and the internet as a means of communication.

I still had my stash of CDs with all kinds of utils, graphic and web design packages, game demos, time management software, LINUX distros etc etc. Some of it got used, but V little really.

So today I started looking through. I wonder how much stuff that was compatible with Windows 3.1 would even run on Win 2000 (that I'm running now). When the next iteration of windows software arrives and that is no longer universally acceptable for soft and hardware (what drove me to upgrade from Win 98) then I'll almost certainly go LINUX and Open Orifice. But for now all those CDs are just taking up space. If Ben wants the cases they're his, otherwise I hope they can be recycled.