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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?"
There is a store (in Cincinnati, at least) called "Computer Renassance" (bad spelling, I know) that buys old computer parts. It isn't hundreds of dollars for the old stuff, but its cash.
Plus, its nice to buy some old stuff (like 200Mhz motherboard/chip) for linux boxen from the store for cheap...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Most of my old computer parts are sitting in storage should a day arrive when we have enough to build a test box, should we want to test anything.
I would consider donation, except that there's not much to donate that's very useful -- we have no spare hard drives, because any HD lying around is invariably tossed somewhere -- usually into the fileserver to give it more storage capacity. We have a few sound cards and some old video cards, but I'm not even sure what works anymore (I tried putting together a bare-bones Linux box from an old PII400; no video at post). Typically stuff sits around until I want to upgrade the NAT router (in case I want to run a local game server or something) which usually happens when someone upgrades their PC (our last upgrade occurred when an Athlon 500 was replaced with a 1.4Ghz...then the 500 took the place of a PII450 and the PII450 replaced a PII233 NAT router).
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Whatever happened to the one website, either freeboxen.com or freeboxen.net? It was like a ebay kinda site where people put up lists of hardware they didn't need any people could request it. All they typically had to pay was shipping.
Sell 'em! Good God man, tax deduction? Much more problems that it's worth. Keep in mind that you can only write off a percentage of the total value. Hardly worth the effort if you ask me. IF you feel benevolent, then just give them to the local charity or whatever.
Otherwise, sell them to some geek on Ebay, charge a fair price and people will pay you to ship to them.
WTF? Over?
I dread the day motherboard manufacturers will finally kill ISA slots though ...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
A lot of my older gear breaks quickly, and sometimes I do it myself. The older hard drives tend to crash, and once that happens, what use is a diskless 386 with 8 mb ram? I tend to take them apart and make stacks of strange computer gear. Two Pentiums that I once had got themselves smashed by crashing everytime I tried to put on Red Hat Linux or Windows. The older and less "used" a system is, the more likely that it will be used in some sort of geeky "experimentation" like hooking it up to a stereo, phone, radio or other electrical gear or installing an obscure, barely tested Unix kernel or alternative OS. This makes it more likely that the poor, over-the-hill machine will meet its demise due to power surged fried circuits or nuked hard disk!
I've got a 486 laptop with a 5" screen. Now what am I going to use that for? Windows 3.1, whew-hew!
Keep some of the useful stuff like soundcards, NIC's, RAM, floppy and hard drives and trash the rest. Never know when that stuff might come in handy. With storage at an all-time low, I can't see too much value in keeping those 500 MB disk drives around; they're just going to crash and make you mad later, anyways. I'd say any motherboard below Pentium is not worth keeping unless you have a lot of patience, an older OS and/or a dedicated task for it to perform, such as routing or firewalling. Even then, the low cost of gear like a Linksys router kind of makes you want to buy something small, useful and well-engineered rather than use an old, clunky x86 with extra NIC's.
Portland, Oregon - FREE GEEK is a non-profit that takes older equipment and makes simple end user Linux boxes (FREEK BOXes) that are given to needy individuals for a few hours of community service recycling computers. The computers come with a class on how to use it and everything. (we've given out a couple a hundred in the last year). http://www.freegeek.org
Usually, my parts wind up going into the boxes owned by various family members. Between me and my mother (who's a Everquest fanatic), the upgrades happen fairly frequently which leaves plenty of spare parts to put in machines for my sister, my young neice and the computers my father uses as point-of-sale systems at his business.
Be nice and see if any of your younger family members could use something that would at least allow them to have 'net access and do word processing. After that, check into donating a working machine (c'mon don't just give them parts) to a local library or school. You may even want to see if there is an after-school activity facility in your area that will take your donation.
If you're just looking to do something with those parts, put them back together, fire it up and get hooked up with the SETI At Home (I don't remember the correct acronym) project, which decodes signals from space using your computer's idle time. Or build a MAME arcade machine. Or generate fractals. The possibilities are endless.
My sigs always suck.
The CoyoteLinux distro runs from a floppy and makes an old machine a perfect firewall provided you add 2 network cards and a floppy disk drive, but this should cheap enough regarding the security you'd get.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I am in the process of doing the same thing. I can't offer specific advice because I don't know what your specific parts and motives are. I have a friend who works in an under funded (aren't they all) school system, they have some hodge podge hardware and they aren't sure how to do it. If you really want to have your donation be effective, you may want to do what I'm doing and spend a few hours on the weekends helping them add your new hardware to the lineup. It helps if you can find a willing school employee to learn what you're doing as you do it too. They might not understand all of the details, but as long as they get the gist they can provide basic support. Donating hardware is a good start, but the schools that can't afford the hardware also can't afford the people necessary to get the systems going either. It is tax deductible and most schools are capable of giving you a receipt for what they would have paid for the same equipment. Usually you can just tell them what it's worth and that's good enough for them since they're getting it for free anyway.
I collect old computer from friends and family and just add them onto my network. I have extra network cards and I just put them into the computers I get, install linux, and put them on the network. When I get bored I setup one as a primary DNS server, one as a secondary DNS. I play around with apache and sendmail configs. And even try to hack into my own machines for security holes. It's fun. Old computers have many uses, thanks to linux.
mp3's are only for those with bad memories
Absolutely - my wife's clinic has a 486 currently running as a file/print server and dialup proxy. I built it as a proof-of-concept and have a P-75 machine standing by to take its place as the permanent server.
;)
No more carrying around floppies to print or share files. No more unplugging the printer to print from the laptop. No more unplugging the phone line to pick up email or surf. No more moving from one machine for producing invoices, another to do email and another to do the books. And a backup strategy is in the works.
Computing power is laying around us in piles. If you really, honestly examine what you need, it's hard to justify a big hardware budget.
Oh, BTW - my budget for building the LAN at my wife's clinic: $50 for a hub. The rest of the parts were just cluttering up my study
My first year at my high school I helped create a computer club called, F.L.A.T.T. (Forest Lake Area Technology Team).
Our teacher bought various cheap 486s, and whatever parts we could scrap up from varios local schools.
We did so much there. I had already knew a bit or two about computers before then, but this was like a crash course. If we wanted computers for the club we had to build them and get them working with what we had. I had a Mac Plus at home and didn't have much knowledge of PCs, but within 3 months I understood IRQ conflicts, RAM types, processors. I could install Windows 3.11 on a 386 blindfolded with both arms behind my back.
We practiced programming and the club grew. Unfourtunately it shrunk when I left to attend college early. It gave me more computer experience than any other experience so far. It was the best, I learned so much by spending many nights after school trying to get hardware and software configs to work.
The only somewhat mention of our group on the web is at the parrell mac computing site AppleSeed
At my school, we use Norton Ghost on donated machines. This is a program that copies an exact disk image from one hard drive onto another. We just make one master hard disk, and clone a hard drive for each machine. The result is that each computer in a "batch" of donations is identical from the user's point of view, and all the computers in the school have more or less the same "look" to them on the desktop. Slap PolEdit on all of them to keep the idiots from messing with the machines, put Centurion Guards on the machines you don't want the smart people messing with either, and you have a really workable setup in which donated machines are quite useful.
Liscencing isn't a problem, as I said, because we just Ghost a clean drive onto all the machines in a donation batch. Ditto for porn and viruses. In fact, the biggest porn problem comes from teachers themselves (surprise surprise). I spent two hours last friday cleaning a science teacher's computer which was filled to capacity with JPEGs of an - ahem - interesting nature.
Drivers sometimes are a problem, but it's rare we can't find them within an hour of searching on the internet. Since we're ghosting each batch of donations anyway, the additional time required for driver installation is nill.
Regarding proprietary hardware: I've seen computers at my high school that would terrify all right-thinking techs. I've seen computers that were being held together with duct tape, computers with all sorts of proprietary crap - especially compaqs, with the funky square keyboard connectors they used a few years ago - but I've never seen anything in a donation so alien no one in the building could work with it.
My district's budget is a joke - donations are the only thing that let us get enough computers. Every non-department-head teacher computer is a donation, as are all the computers in the programming lab. I don't know what we'd do without people giving us their half-working crap, and our fixing it and putting it in a place it has to be.
Interesting sidenote: You know who gives us more computers than anyone else? Anheiser Bush.
I'm the stranger...posting to
I'm really glad I don't have to deal with that kind of stuff at my school. I am in an Electronic Engineering and telecommunications class right now. We get to do some interesting stuff most of the time. Although the teacher will make us work on circuit diagrams just to piss us off if we are bad in class. That is an effective punishment, making you calculate every resistance/voltage/current in a complex circuit..
Plus we get plenty of time to do whatever we want, if it is somewhat related to the class, and we don't have anything more important. I am a second year student in the class, so I get to take it for a whole half day, and we're basicly in charge of keeping the other computer labs running and all the teacher's PCs set up right. When we don't have something more important to do we get to experiment with whatever we want. Lately, we've been through a round of Mandrake Linux installs. Last week was BeOS(RIP).
It does seem like it would be a lot cheaper to have students do all the basic software installations and setups, instead of having to pay someone to do it...
Shit adds up at the bottom...