Slashdot Mirror
What Do You Do With Old Computer Parts?
yoyoma writes "I am planning to rebuild our desktop computers. What do other slashdotters do with old computer parts? I would prefer to donate them. These are some old parts that I will end up with: two GA-686LX motherboards with PII 233, greater than 224 MB RAM (the new computers will take DDR), some video cards (Matrox) and possibly two ATX cases with 300 watts powersupplies (looking for quieter, smaller cases). Decent enough, but they will have no hard drives, floppy drives, or CD drives. TecsChange, and this other place accept donation of parts. Has anyone done this? What about the receipts for tax purposes?"
I cannibalize like mad. Power supply fans are often good for supplemental case ventilation... provided the reason the PSU is dead is something OTHER than the fan was crap and it overheated.
For complete systems, though, I generally send them to places that ship them off to disadvantaged areas (like Cuba). You don't run up against snooty "What? A PII is way too slow" from there, that's for certain.
As for destinations - I give local schools and libraries first shot at them.
Just my .02
I've made good money selling 32 pin SIMMs I had from the days I was working at a computer assembler : I had a bagfull of 256K and 4M SIMMs and up until about 2 years ago, they sold at crazy prices. Same for EDO DIMM modules. So if you do nothing else, put those 224M RAM of yours in an antistatic bag and enjoy the return on investment in 2 or 3 years. It's not that RAM gets more expensive, it's just that standards get deprecated, therefore more rare, therefore more expensive.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
no, don't curse your schools with surplus hardware!
i could live a little longer in this prison
I've donated crates of old hardware and software to them.
Stonewolf
Will that cheap Linksys router let you write whatever TCI/IP filtering rules you would like?
Can you install apache and PHP on it to put up a basic website?
Will it tell you how much traffic you are sending to and from the net?
Can you install wget on it so you don't have to use a spyware infested windows DL manager?
My 486/33, 16 MB RAM, 1 GB HD does all this and more if I wanted it to, and does it well. It keeps the wolves away from my gaming machine and my game latencies increased by maybe 10 ms. The broadband routers are nice but don't expect them to do what a PC can. You say that the routers are useful and well-engineered, and imply that old x86's are not. Old x86's are just as well-engineered, they just didn't have the advances in technology or in design concepts we have now. Were steam engines poorly engineered because they were built before internal combustion? Were the engineers of the steam era less intelligent than modern engineers? Answer: No!
Also, don't a lot of devices, such as broadband routers, use 486 class chips?
In spite of the less-than-rosy economic picture, a lot of people are going to buy new computers so they can effectively run Office XP [on which they will only use about 10% of the features]. That just doesn't make sense to me.
How much RAM does Word take nowadays? And don't tell me that memory is cheap and this kind of bloat doesn't matter. It does. People are getting their clocks cleaned trying to keep up with what amounts to a proprietary communications protocol [.doc].
Far from making "kick-arse" machines that can stay current for 12 months. We seem to be entering into an "arse-kicking" machine of our own making.
[ just for fun
if more people would do this, we would have an
abundant supply of capable PC techs in the IT
industry instead of the morons that are now the
majority.
people need to learn to be flexible, and throwing
10 different systems at someone and telling them
to try to install (insert your OS here) on them
will force them to become flexible and creatively
resourceful.
ordering 100 Dells and handing them to students
could never inspire the same sort of learning
experience...
Bravo!!
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Unfortunately, you could save money (and be more environmentally friendly) in the long run by replacing all these boxes with a single P2-class box.
Bear in mind that running those machines 24/7 uses a fair amount of electricity, and this adds up pretty fast.
I've got an old Mac IIci at home that I've been meaning to do a project NetBSD box on, but have just never gotten around to it because I don't relish the idea of yet another machine I don't need running all the time.
-l