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A Different Take On PC Manus' 'Recycling' Schemes
Timex writes "Linux Devices is reporting that the COO of Linux startup Symbio Technologies, Roger Del Russo, claims that the recycling programs of Dell and HP are nothing more than a means of getting older systems out of use, to be replaced by newer systems. Mr Del Russo then makes the case for putting the older systems to good use as thin clients, using the Linux Terminal Server Project."
We use the LTSP at school, it makes working on the older computers (such as the ones in the library) not so unbearable. On the same note, must of the computers in my school are dual-boot w2k/red hat.
Hi there
Well, in Soviet Russia... wait, no, I refuse to make such a stupid comment... :) :)
Seriously though, this sounds like it might be a decent idea. There's nothing wrong with using old systems for something... how many people out there run their old 486DXs as firewalls or NATs, honestly? Probably quite a few...
And, if ANYthing can turn an old system into something new and useful, it would have to be Linux. For all the griping about it, it's far superior to any Microsoft product when it comes to custom built applications (not the program types, thats another story) for hardware... way to go!
Oh, and I think this MIGHT be a FP... not sure
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That sits on a curb for longer than an hour.
True, in the city they get tossed into dumpsters, but not before the IT people get first shot at them. I still have computers from before 1990. I'm sure some of the rest of us do too.
Every few weeks one of my employees is talking about their latest dumpster dive acquisition - a dual processor p2 box was a recent acquisition by one of them.
This guy might just have a point.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Using old PCs as Linux stations is a great idea, but when you include the $699 licensing fee it can add up quickly.
Trolling is a art,
A former colleague of mine tells me there is now a skip in the loading bay, full of Dell desktop and laptop machines. These are going back to be "recycled".
They could have sold the laptops two or three times over, but these machines must go back to Dell because "they're 70% recyclable". As this chap pointed out, surely if they were sold they'd be 100% recyclable. Which does indeed beg the question, is recycling really the aim here?
Gateway came out with a trade in program and if I remember correctly they didn't hide the fact they werer trying to get old systems out of use.
http://Lenny.com
Sure, you can use PINE or tin on an older PC without problems. Sure, you can try and shift the computing and processing burden away from the (thin) client. That, however, won't make the end users happy. They are accustomed to a certain level of usability, both regarding speed and user interface. People just plain don't want to deal with anything other - or less - than what they're used to.
So, whilst there are still applications for older systems as thin clients you're mostly limited to situations where your intended user base simply doesn't have a choice. As soon as they're paying for it or depending on your it for their daily work most people just won't accept being forced to use an old computer. They want their new, shiny PC and their sexy, modern LCD screen.
I say to "shaft" companies like Dell\HP start community projects to refurbish old PCs is good working order. You could install a simple Linux distribution such as Mandrake on them. Then, give them out to underprivileged children. Just a thought, would be quite an undertaking.
Hey.
Don't forget about charity; I volunteer for an organization that cleans up old PCs and gives them to needy families with children in school, and there are hundreds of organizations out there that do similar things. We won't take trash, but an old Pentium is often a fine system for word processing and basic web mojo, which is what most needy recipients would be doing.
If a corporation says it's doing something altruistically (open sourcing shit (MS), recycling PCs to "save the environment") it always has other interests to serve.
If that sounds cynical, I'm sorry. But it's true: corporations work for profit, and as far as I can see the only reason a corporation would want to recycle PCs is to get new ones out on the market. NO OTHER REASON.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Recently, I set up a small Debian-based computer lab using LTSP at the school I attend. Currently, it only has the server and 5 thin clients, but it is astounding what can be done with this hardware:
Server: 800 MHz Pentium III, 1 GB SDRAM, dual 20 GB hard drives.
Thin Clients (all diskless and netbooting thanks to LTSP): 233 MHz Cyrix III with 64 MB RAM, 233 MHz Pentium II with 48 MB RAM, 333 MHz Celeron with 32 MB RAM, 300 MHz Pentium II with 64 MB RAM, 150 MHz Pentium MMX with 32 MB RAM (IIRC).
This setup can have 6 people (one on the server plus the thin clients) running Gaim + Mozilla + OpenOffice with very little slowdown. Rarely is it noticeable. And it is very easy to manage; since there is only one computer with Debian and all the data and whatnot on it, only one box has to be updated, had new users added, etc.
Total cost so far: $0, it is all just hardware out of my friend's basements and mine. The fact that no money has to be spent to get something like this to work (and work well) really shows that a new, shiny 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 is not needed just to check email and browse the web. The science department at this same school actually just recieved 24 new 3.2 GHz Dells, and the most that is ever done on them are Excel spreadsheets!
Imagine the money that can be saved by using old but completely useful computers instead of upgrading every couple of years when it is unneeded... (and spending more money on licenses for new versions of Office and Windows and etc.)
Of course they want you to upgrade, the question is what becomes of the old computers. My understanding is that the vast majority of computers donated are nearly worthless to schools because they cannot run any modern programs. These computers are only good as thin clients and most non-profits don't have a thin client setup. If his proposed arrangement takes off, NPO's could specifically say:Give us your old hardware. Until then, I'm glad OEM's are disposing of the systems properly (assuming they aren't just shipping them off to China or something).
i reuse old pc's like crazy, too, for myself and for nonprofits i work with. but think of the number of damn new machines you're talking about -- recent pc industry growth reports suggested that ~100M of the new PCs shipping this year will be replacing old ones! it's just like recycling other materials: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. The first word is Reduce for a reason -- it's the most important step, and the hardest to motivate people about.
n@
Uhm... that sounds kind of like X-Windows...
I've known at least 10 people who have started businesses around the idea of giving old PCs a new life. One of them, Roger Gross, started Icentrix ltd. (now defunct), that used to make "MarioNet" appliances (essentially old PC serving as X servers and web browsers, talking to a centralized box).
Most of these guys' companies either don't fare too well, or are kaput, because the idea is, well, obvious...
> the recycling programs of Dell and HP are nothing
> more than a means of getting older systems out of
> use, to be replaced by newer systems
Exactly what did he expect these recycling programs are for? Of course they're primarily a means to sell new systems!
If a company has a bunch of HP/Dell PCs that are about to reach their end-of-life, they can either arrange the disposal themselves or give them back to the vendor to dispose of. Many companies will offer the PCs to their employees for a very low cost, and some of these employees will take them, put Linux on them and give them to charity. Maybe the company has someone on staff that acts as a focal point for charitable distribution of these PCs (as well as new stuff); if so, that person may take on the role of coordinating that sort of work.
***If this is "all too hard" for the company, and they just want to get rid of the old PCs without being accused of screwing up the environment by dumping them somewhere***, they're free to give them back to Dell/HP who'll dispose of them. Some companies see this as a useful thing; they've got a problem (disposal of a bunch of PCs without screwing the environment) and Dell/PC will take care of the problem for them. That's called a "competitive advantage".
Here's news: there's no fleet of people at Dell/HP who call up every charity in the world trying to dispose of old PCs 24x7! There may be a few people who take the role on themselves, but there's no way a few people can dispose of thousands of old PCs on an ongoing basis in their spare time.
It's *not* trivial to donate these PCs; among other things, either they have to arrange for MS to transfer the OS licence to some unknown recipient (unlikely), or they have to arrange a workforce to format discs, install e.g. Linux on them and then train whoever it is these PCs are going to be given to. Strangely, neither Dell or HP feel it is their role to act as unpaid Linux trainers for the world's underprivileged! Finally, if a charity receives a free PC from Dell/HP, there's at least an implied support arrangement there - when that old clunker of a PC breaks down, who's gonna get called?
If Slashdot or any other organization wants to form a group of people who will take these PCs, reformat them, install Linux, donate them to the world's charities and provide support afterwards, I'm sure Dell and HP would be very happy to hear about it. After all, that group would then be solving a problem Dell and HP have - how to dispose of the PCs. Do that; the world will benefit from it and probably vendors other than Dell and HP will want to jump on board too. If not, then find something real to complain about.
At ITShare SA take donated hardware, install Linux, and donate to low income groups and individuals....We have sister organisations all over Australia tooo, doing the same. We would LOVE to get donations from Dell & HP of all these stockpiled computers - we are always desperate for hardware. No licencing issues! Ongoing supports for recipients! Win Win!!!
Nothing - well thats something.
I'm not going to go posting a link here and bring the Slashdot effect down on my own company, but we started a buyback program in March (long before we knew about Dell and HP's plans - maybe they stole them from us!) for exactly this reason - get the old stuff away from the users and replace it with newer hardware. For us, the aging Pentium and Pentium 2 systems, most of which are still running Windows 95 or 98, are a support nightmare. The systems are not under warranty any longer, components are no longer available through distribution, and we don't have time to be searching ebay looking for a used 266MHz CPU. Besides, our customers tend to look at us funny when the bill ends up showing 4-5 hours of labor because of the cost involved in finding and obtaining old components. It's just not worth being in that market when a quality business class machine runs just under $1000 US.
As for thin client, it's a solution some of our customers like. However, it doesn't resolve the old hardware issue. Instead, it actually adds to the problem be extending the life of systems that were never designed to last more than 3-5 years. In the past week we have had a customer complain that their last 200MHz machine just died, another client complained that their last machine with ISA slots died and now they can't use their first gen ATI AIW ISA card, and we had a call from a client that couldn't figure out how to get their new (USB only) printer working with their 6 or 7 year old desktop (with no USB).
Supporting this old stuff for the SMB (small/mid-sized business) clients is a nightmare. We spend a lot of time convincing customers to "recycle" about 1/3 of their PC hardware per year so that all of their hardware is covered under warranty and so we can support the most recent Windows operating systems and applications throughout their organizations. Having part of the office on Windows XP, part on Windows NT 4, and part on Windows 95, and half under warranty and half not covered under warranty just increases support and management costs.
I think many people think that many older machines can't run newer Windows versions.
Actually, you can still run Windows 2000 Professional, given that the minimum requirement to run W2K Pro is a Pentium 133 MHz CPU. Given that there are a lot of machines out there with the ATX form factor that use the Intel 440LX and 440BX chipsets with at least a Pentium II 233 MHz CPU, you can set up for them to run W2K Pro with at least 256 MB of RAM installed (most of the 440LX/440BX chipset mobos can support three 168-in DIMM's for at least 384 MB of RAM) and a 16 to 20 GB hard drive.
I myself run W2K Pro on an Abit AB-BM6 440BX chipset motherboard with a Celeron "A" 500 MHz CPU; W2K Pro runs pretty decently fast, notably bacause I have 384 MB of system RAM installed.
In my humble opinion, if your computing needs are primarily business apps and accessing the Internet, you really don't need the fastest machine out there. It's only when you have to play the latest games or run programs to edit digital still pictures or videos downloaded from a MiniDV/MicroDV digital camcorder that you really do need a machine with a faster CPU.
The computer of my boss (the head of a small company that isn't afraid to spend money on computers) is a 600MHz Pentium III that came with NT4. It now dual boots into linux and has more memory (cheap), a good video card (v. cheap), more disk space - and now in most cases it appears to give an instant reponse to what is asked for it. About the only things that make the machine show its age is Open Office - which is even slower to start than win4lin plus a fairly old MSOffice, but once it has started going it works well. It's not about being a cheapskate, the machine does what it needs to do, and I put four new dual 2.8GHz Xeon servers in that office yesterday, which are doing some of the real work while the desktop machine is working as an Xterm displaying what thirteen other machines can do to some data over a weekend.
Not enough years back the only hardware I had to use was a pentium 90 with a pitiful amount of memory and a crap video card, but it was surpisingly effective with linux, Xfree86 and a lean enlightenment theme on it, so long as I ran the actual applications (from netscape up) on an SGI machine in the next building. The major failing of that machine was a lack of OpenGL support - a new video card would have fixed that easily and the machine could be used even today, so long as you only have a budget of just above zero. If there's something nice on the network, and things are set up properly, you can get away with all kinds of old hardware.
To sum up, even if you are not worried about spending the cash, you don't always need an incredible 3D games machine on your desk at work - and your machine that is getting a few years old may not slow you down at all.
I was interested enough to click the link, but I get the following;
Sorry
We at Showtime Online express our apologies; however, these pages are intended for access only from within the United States.
I don't recall ever seeing such a message before. This is now intriguing me so much I may have to log into my employer's intranet, choose a North America based proxy to get out onto the real Internet and have another try.
You have that backwards. Desktops haven't gotten to the point where they're anywhere near thin client (what we used to call "terminals") in TCO. When we went from using X terminals to using desktop computers the cost went through the roof: we needed more support people and more people spent more time dealing with problems on their Windows boxes.
The only reason we switched was that we watched the applications and solutions we had been using getting crowded out by ones that required Windows, and the remote Windows solutions simply didn't work well enough. If you have the software you need available on a non-Windows platform, diskless or dataless terminals are much much more cost-effective.
That all happened between five and ten years ago. Today, in the same position, I'd be all over thin clients like a shot... alas, we have since been bought by a new company that has centralised IT and I'm not in a position to make that kind of change.