Mass Hardware Salvage Methods?

gte024h writes: "I have been approached by a friend working at a mid-sized corporation about a plan to salvage hardware from their "dead" computers to make working computers which would then be donated to a local school. In the past I have salvaged old hardware from them, but only a few machines at a time. With this plan I will initially get about 40 identical machines with perhaps many more later (he says they have a warehouse full). I have no idea what condition these machines will be in but I am pretty sure that out of 40 non-functional machines I should be able to get 10-15 working. Does anyone have experience doing anything like this? Would it be faster to strip the machines and test the components individually, or to troubleshoot each machine whole? Any ideas for efficient testing and such are greatly appreciated."

I know that volunteers from LXNY recently did something similar with a whole boatload of donated computers; anyone with experience care to comment on how to best handle the mixed blessing of donated, but old, hardware?

Comments

What I'd do

[JediTrainer]

Get a few units working 100%. Using those units, test the components of all the other units in assembly-line fashion (first test all the hard drives in the working units at once, then the power sources etc). Doing it this way will save you from having to debug each individually and will let you add parts to the "good" and "Bad" piles much more efficiently, by using the same procedure for all of them at the same time. You will get into a rhythm which will speed things up this way.

What do you want from them?

[Patman]

The question is, do you want parts, or whole systems?
If you're looking for whole systems, boot each one
until you find one that works. Swap parts from ones that
don't boot into the ones that do until you find
which parts are damaged on the unbootables.

If you're going for parts, take all 40 apart. Build
one out of good parts, maybe, for testing purposes.
Test them en masse - hard drive after hard drive
after hard drive, for instance.

Either way, this could be a nice windfall. Don't forget
to save all the little things that come in handy, like
like expansion card covers, screws, power supplies, etc.

Try 'em out ...

[Pogue Mahone]

From personal experience, the parts that usually fail through age are (in order):

1. Monitors (especially the cheaper ones) - easy to check out, although sometimes they only start failing after an hour or more of use.

2. PSU and CPU fans - usually very noisy, but silent once totally dead. Watch out for this.

3. Mouse - yeah, well...

4. Disk drives - which might be recoverable if it's only bad blocks, but probably not worth the effort.

Motherboards and other solid-state bits very rarely fail through age (unless the CPU fried due to 2). Most failures on these bits happen early in their lifetime. It's called the bathtub curve, and PCs are unlikely to be on the upward slope (unless they're _really_ old, in which case it probably isn't worth the effort of even looking at them.)

So your best bet would be to test all the boxes first, using a known good monitor/keyboard/mouse. Those that don't work can be stripped and diagnosed individually.

--

CMOS Batteries!

[BigBlockMopar]

Lemme nominate a part which I would place between 2 and 3; give it number 2.5 on your list.

CMOS batteries. Especially on those nasty generic motherboards that are too cheap to have any provision for replacement. (ie. no battery socket, no 4 pin connector with the jumper cap over the middle two, etc.)

Either ditch the board or break out the soldering iron.