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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?"
Your local school district would probably be happy to receive the parts. Anything older than that probably wouldn't be useful, but these sound similar to a number of systems (200+) that we donated to the San Francisco Public Schools after our last round of upgrades.
I don't know for a fact that the schools can give you receipts for tax purposes, but knowing my employer it seems a good bet.
Wait... you mean you still haven't joined the ACLU?
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!
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.
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
As for destinations - I give local schools and libraries first shot at them.
Just my .02
Typing "computer recycling" in google led me on the FIRST LINK to:
The national directory of computer recycling programs
Scrolling down, I found the second link:
The computer recycling center
You can take it from there....
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
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
freegeek.org takes donations in Portland, Oregon. They also teach linux for free and give you a free computer if you complete the course!!!
I'm out like Elian.
S. ALan(TM)
My local community college offers a course for building computers. It helps people understand computer hardware, AND it helps people obtain a useful, low-cost machine.
Components like the ones described by the poster are in demand - reasonably modern equipment, and with a few extra pieces (like drives), the builder can save hundreds of dollars and have a useful and potentially upgradable home PC for the kids.
Other options include the local school district or the local place of worship - whatever floats your boat. Or give it to the neighbor kid who is interested in such things.
The only thing I ask you not to do is to let it rot - by storing it in a closet until it's useless, or by putting it out with the garbage.
right if you want to donate a machine
put manuals in plastic bag along with driver disk and phyically attach it to hardware
(those plastic ties are nice )
this is to prevent it getting lost if they seperate the box from board
FORMAT HARD DISK
(do it with a linux distro for a laugh and root pass =password)
HOW Many machines Have I boot to find letters to tax man porn and such is quite unbeliveable
those 2 steps are really nice
my advice is walk into a primary school with a linux box and X up and running with a edu game on it and the teachers love you (-;
regards
john jones
Their Thrift Stores take old computers and give you a receipt. Not sure about parts, but old complete systems are fine. (Just donatated one recently.)
I tend to store old parts in a pile, or closet. You never know when they will become useful. Someday I know I will need to use that old CGA card again, and you can never have too many 20 Mb drives lying around. You don't know that you won't learn how to fix that old burnt out monitor, and that floppy drive that exhibits destructive tendacies may come in handy sometime. Don't let me get started on my colection of power cords and other misc cables.
By all means keep them around. I've found that an excellent place to keep all this is in large rubbermade tubs under the stairs. Out of sight, but easy to get to when you need them, and also relatively dust free.
Anyhow, does anyone know of a way to get rid of / recycle the really old hardware without paying someone to take it?
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Check your local geek clubs. UFO (Users of Free Operating Systems) Chicago has a list of its members' idle hardware. I sold an old SCSI drive and video card that I've been holding onto for a few years for just about market value to another UFO member.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
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
I work for a non-profit group here in Michigan, The Geek Group, that is always looking for donations. We run quite a few classes to teach kids about computers and keeping a steady flow of systems to have them rip apart and learn tends to be a strugle.
akaylor@thegeekgroup.org
http://www.thegeekgroup.org
"The Geek Group is an American based, 501-c-3, non-profit organization with members from all over the world who have been brought together for one simple purpose, to have fun while learning and sharing knowledge for a positive impact on mankind.
We educate the public with fun and interesting science projects. From our Tesla Coil to Geekmobile Unit 3, our projects catch the eye while demonstrating scientific concepts in a fun and interesting manner. In addition to this, we also conduct classes on various areas of computer science, mechanical and electrical engineering, high voltage physics and more.
The Group also offers services to the public. Current on-line services include computer repair and web design. We are also capable of security advising, prototypical design, and software development. We also hold private demonstrations of our projects for schools and other groups.
To learn more about The Geek Group, please feel feel to browse the site. We promise to keep you entertained. Because the Geek shall inherit the Earth!"
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.
no, don't curse your schools with surplus hardware!
i could live a little longer in this prison
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
The table I am working on right now is made from an old wooden door, covered with a thick blade of transparent glass. The many layers of paint, some of them decades old, were sttripped out almost, but not quite, back to the original wood.
:)
Inside the door carvings there are 5 1/4" disks of various colours, some memory chips, a internal modem, some other unidentified chips, some serail and paralel ports. There are also other raw eletronic components.
The final effect is very good.
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.
There are lots of programs like Charlottesville's Computers4Kids out there. We'll take any processor at or above 130MHz, drives over 1GB, and other things of that generation. I don't know of any central directory of similar programs, but if there's not one, I know that we'd love to have 'em!
-Waldo
One word: Keychain. Nothing says "Geek" like some RAM in your pocket with your keys. SIMMs already have wholes that most of those little steel ball chain keychains fit through, no modification required.
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