What To Do With Old 802.11b Equipment?

CyberSlugGump writes "I am trying to declutter, and I have come across my cheap, off-brand, consumer-grade 802.11b wireless routers, PCMCIA cards, and USB adapters. The routers would still be good as 4-port 100Mb switches, and the other devices have at least 32-bit Windows XP drivers available. However, lack of security beyond WEP and the age of the equipment makes me wonder if it is worth any time putting it to use."

Comments

I think it's a good question.

[jawtheshark]

However, I think the reply to is "trash them". I'm probably not using my imagination enough, so I'm eager to read to suggestions of others. I'm a tech dumpster-diver and even I had to up my standards regarding equipment. With computers, I won't take anything less than 1Ghz++ AMD XP or P-IV, preferably with DDR RAM, but I'm not all that picky since usually you have decide on the spot and can't just open the machine up first.

With networking gear, I don't bother with anything beyond 100Mbps in wired and 802.11g for wireless. It simply is not worth the hassle.

The only thing I really can think of, is use the hardware to make a wireless bridge if you have two locations to connect that are out of range (can-tenna, etc...) A 11Mbps directional link is better than no link at all. That said, considering the 802.11g prices, you can probably just do it with newer hardware that will use less power. 54Mbps gear is already to be found in dumpsters near you.... I'm not kidding.

The other option would be to re-use it for people you can help in the low-income bracket. An older P-III laptop with a 802.11b card and a 802.11b router/access point is better than no gear at all. Still, my experience says that most people -even those in the lower income bracket- don't want the old gear. The few times I did manage to give away refurbished older hardware was to a single-income mom, working as an analyst in the tech sector, so her income wasn't "low" by any stretch of imagination, for her daughters use. (It was a AMD Athlon XP 2800+, 1GB RAM running Ubuntu 8.10 back then... Haven't gotten any news since). The others were just computer enthousiasts (professional or hobbists) who wanted something to toy around with.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[broken_chaos]

The other option would be to re-use it for people you can help in the low-income bracket. An older P-III laptop with a 802.11b card and a 802.11b router/access point is better than no gear at all. Still, my experience says that most people -even those in the lower income bracket- don't want the old gear at all.

An alternative is donating it to charity. Some of them will probably take it and either give it away or set it up for use somewhere.

Charities involving third-world countries (sorry, "developing nations") may be a particularly grateful bunch, even for old equipment.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[rwa2]

If you live in a densely populated area with lots of wifi access points around you, running old 802.11b gear will likely degrade the quality or at least the SNR of the other wifi networks on similar channels around you. So keep in mind that running some old gear in the airwaves around could as well do more harm by degrading the throughput of new gear. The new gear could make much more efficient use of the available spectrum, around you, which is getting to be more of a scarce shared resource.

The only thing I'd consider doing with old gear is piecing together "complete systems" geared towards a single use case... maybe a low bandwidth visual paging system for a golf course or something silly like that.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[Hatta]

I'm a tech dumpster-diver and even I had to up my standards regarding equipment. With computers, I won't take anything less than 1Ghz++ AMD XP or P-IV, preferably with DDR RAM, but I'm not all that picky since usually you have decide on the spot and can't just open the machine up first.

On the other hand I won't take anything greater than a 486. Older computers are just more fun.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[jqh1]

... a AMD Athlon XP 2800+, 1GB RAM running Ubuntu 8.10 back then... Haven't gotten any news since).

-- you actually managed to give away equipment without getting tech support calls about it every week for the next 5 years? Please provide more details.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[Anonymous Coward]

An alternative is donating it to charity. Some of them will probably take it and either give it away or set it up for use somewhere.

Charities involving third-world countries (sorry, "developing nations") may be a particularly grateful bunch, even for old equipment.

It'll end up being "recycled" there anyway if you trash it. It might as well be something they can use, rather than just something which will poison them.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[bami]

>Charities involving third-world countries (sorry, "developing nations") may be a particularly grateful bunch, even for old equipment.

Charities involving third-world countries usually results in dumping lots of toxic stuff into places that don't have the resources to clean it up properly.
Seriously, they are better off with you hauling that stuff to a recycling center instead of having it shipped over there. Computers contain a lot of hazardous stuff, and when they are done with it, just dump it somewhere, instead of properly disposing it in a safe place.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[twistedsymphony]

^I'm also interested in this.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[tapanitarvainen]

my experience says that most people -even those in the lower income bracket- don't want the old gear.

There are people who like old gear for philosophical reasons, even when money isn't really an issue. I recently found a good home for an Athlon XP 1500+ (1.3GHz) -based box as an email/www terminal in a used car parts shop (put in a 40GB disk and two 512MB DIMMs scavenged elsewhere and installed Ubuntu in it), and they've been happy with it - suits their business idea of recycling old stuff, they told me.

I can remember many other amazingly old and slow machines that have found happy owners in people who could easily have bought new stuff if they wanted to.

In general, though, I'd discard (= recycle properly) stuff that's been significantly superseded in terms of electricity consumption - if a new one saves its price in one year's electricity bill, there's no point in keeping the old one. But stuff that's just slow by modern standards, like 802.11b gear, may well find a happy owner in someone who ideologically likes recycling and doesn't need more speed (and quite a few people don't). But people in low income brackets are more likely to feel using old stuff is somehow demeaning and reject it for that reason, even if it'd be perfectly usable.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[master0ne]

second... more details please!

Re:I think it's a good question.

[DesScorp]

"I can remember many other amazingly old and slow machines that have found happy owners in people who could easily have bought new stuff if they wanted to."

I've got an old Dell 333mhz Celeron box that I use as a server for a public access wi-fi network for our patrons at work, and many of the access points are 802.11b. Since it's a public, then WEP doesn't even come into it. The Dell has 320 mb of RAM, a 3 gig hard drive, and it runs Debian on XFCE with a minimal installation. Basically it's just a DHCP server and firewall for our patrons while they surf, and it works beautifully. And otherwise, it would be in a landfill somewhere.

As for 802.11b, there are plenty of uses for it in appropriate situations. And while WEP has vulnerabilities, really, how many people know how to exploit them? I wouldn't use it in a situation that required absolute security, but if you've picked a good passphrase, 802.11b is much less of a security risk than standard desktop apps that we 'd never dream of getting rid of.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[postbigbang]

There's the generational trade off.

If a machine can run Linux kernels 2.6.18+, then it can use cpufreq to take advantage of processor slowdown techniques.

Windows Vista+ can do some of the same thing to save power, also Windows 2008+.

The second you add in a hypervisor kernel, however, throw away all of your green savings as they grab systicks to themselves and you'll save nothing, kvm-in-the-kernel notwithstanding.

The number of older machines that can save juice is somewhere between zero and none if they're 32-bit or less.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[Coren22]

Wear this and you will be fine:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/brain/whereisit.cgi?t=I+will+not+fix+your+computer&x=0&y=0

I never got the nerve to do it myself, so tell me how it goes.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[cjb658]

Do old computers use more power than new ones? Power supplies have been increasing their wattage in the last 10-15 years.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[Pengo]

I have 2-3 routers like this at my house.

I found that when i'm at my moms place, she has a lot of dead spots in her home. I've tried to catch reception from the back-yard patio for example. Their house was wired for ethernet, to at least 3 major points in the home which are all tied to the router. I created 2 access points on the 2 oposite sides of the house.

Sure it's 802.11b , but that's enough for my iphone to connect to or one of my sisters to attach a laptop to , to simply check her Facebook or email.

802.11b is slow, but really it's faster than the 3G cell networks still, and is fast enough to do most tasks that any typical laptop user might need.

I unloaded some old junk, and scored points on the parent-meter = ) It's a great way to pass on the love, and improve those long sunday visits when you can't get good signal to their main router. =)

Re:I think it's a good question.

[b0bby]

P4s use more power than modern machines. If you could use a PIII for something, an Atom would probably work as well & use even less power, though I'd rather reuse something all else being equal. The nominal wattage on a power supply doesn't really say all that much about what a machine is actually using.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[wed128]

I own that shirt. All it does is remind people that you are capable of fixing their problems, which they make a note of and ask you when you're not wearing the shirt.

all in all, it fails at it's intended purpose.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[Anonymous Coward]

(It was a AMD Athlon XP 2800+, 1GB RAM)

That's the spec of my -good- stuff (maybe 2GB RAM). Using Mandriva, it still does anything I need.

Now I feel so old . . .

Re:I think it's a good question.

[Hatta]

In general, though, I'd discard (= recycle properly) stuff that's been significantly superseded in terms of electricity consumption - if a new one saves its price in one year's electricity bill, there's no point in keeping the old one.

It won't. I have a dual 450mhz P3 box doing light web browsing/music duty. I got a Kill-A-Watt device and calculated how much it was costing me to keep it running 24/7. Even if I assumed an Atom based replacement used 0W, it would have taken 2 years for a cheap Atom box to pay for itself. Electricity is cheap. Buying new stuff when the old stuff is functional isn't doing a damn thing for the environment either.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It varies. The rated wattage(which is sometimes even not a lie) of "enthusiast" power supplies has been climbing steadily, as the ability to purchase and cool seriously toasty chips, often several per system, has become substantially cheaper and more widespread. Though, it should always be noted that "rated wattage" means "power it can deliver without Something Bad happening" not "Power it actually uses". The rated wattage of high-density servers has increased substantially for similar reasons, and those wattage ratings usually aren't lies.

On the other hand, performance-per-watt has been improving markedly over the years, and the efficiency of non-crap PSUs has made decent strides. Also, the ability of modern chips(CPUs and GPUs particularly, though often smaller stuff as well) to intelligently throttle themselves when unused or lightly used has improved pretty markedly.

Thus, it is basically impossible to say whether "old computers use more power than new ones". It's just too general a statement to be meaningful. On the one hand, nobody on the high end blinks at a 150watt TDP processor, where(back in the day), hitting 60 watts on your crazy overclock was considered seriously hardcore. On the other hand, an ever increasing proportion of computers in actual use are laptops which cram the entire computer, and a monitor, into a 60watt or less AC adapter, and conserve power on idle like their (battery) lives depend on it.

In general, the ability of people, who don't have $250,000 to spare and a datacenter to house the beast, to buy very energy-hungry computers has increased significantly over time(1.5 kilowatt PSUs definitely didn't use to be retail items). On the other hand, though, performance per watt has gone through the roof(and CRTs have largely gone out the window). Whether ditching an old piece of gear for a new one is usually a case-by-case thing. If your mid-90's junker can be replaced by a weedy little plastic ARM box that runs off a wall wart that weighs under a hundred grams, the replacement almost certainly saves energy. Replacing a late-model PIII and a 17-inch CRT with a new Quad-core and a 28-inch LCD probably won't(though you will get surprisingly close to breaking even, and the performance will be a lot better).

This is why the energy economics of using obsolete x86s as networking gear are usually pretty weak, while those of getting rid of generic business desktop c. 1999 just to replace it with generic business desktop c. 2009 probably won't be nearly as exciting(unless the ACPI on the old box was painfully broken, as it not infrequently was)...

Re:I think it's a good question.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm using an XP 1300, radeon 9600, 512 RAM right now. It's fine with Ubuntu; no lightweight distro needed. GoogleEarth, Youtube, tunes, whatever -- all the general purpose daily stuff runs fine on this sort of box, though it's been far surpassed in the stores, where retailer must sell something better than last year.

These boxes shouldn't yet be associated with "other amazingly old and slow machines". We haven't had the same sort of evident generational change, like when you could get along with Pentium I and 98 if you were careful, while the current machines were PIII/IV and XP.

Probably the thing to do is not tell people receiving that it's way old, just "second hand", even though yeah, these machines are considered throwaway for value now. Avoid stigma by just not mentioning it. They're not going to notice.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[PsychoElf]

I just wear it everyday, plus the smell of unwashed laundry keeps people at bay...

Re:I think it's a good question.

[TheCarp]

Heh craigslist works. Actually, I became a huge fan of piling stuff out in front of my house the day before trash pickup, and posting an ad on craigslist with the address and a catalog of what is in the trash. Either they will come and get it...or Waste Management Employees will do it. Either way, my part is done.

I tried to sell some random equipment (literally a couple of turntables that a previous roommate left in the basement when he skipped out oweing me rent money years ago). It turned into an annoying experience as one of the guys kept asking if they were stolen (perhaps clue #1 that I was asking lower than they were worth, I had checked ebay and a few other places to get an idea), and telling me how he doesn't like stolen merchandise.

In the end I told him that if he finds they are stolen, I would be happy to point the police at the person who abandoned them in my basement and sent him on his way. Though, this guy seemed quick to jump to conclusions. He saw a jar of pot (about a half oz... hey, its a civil fine here :)) that my roommate left out and asked if he was in a grow house! ROTFL!

Then, a friend of mine showed up to pick me up (I think we had to go pick up my car from the shop) in a black crown vic, and his eyes lit up as I was waving and walking to the car and asked "Who is that!?!". I figured I may as well leave him to his delusions, so I winked at him and smiled and said "Its good to have friends" and jumped in the car.

So yah... all in all... not dealing with the people directly is far less annoyance, though... also makes for less amusing of a story. Makes me wonder how he tells the story. I wonder if he tells everyone the turntables were bought off a couple of crooked pot growing cops. \

In any case, I never got any calls from the police so either he never looked into it, or my ex-roomate didn't steal the turntables (or they were never reported stolen). Not that I would have been surprised either way, when he was kicked out I had one of the other roomates accusing him of stealing.

-Steve

Re:I think it's a good question.

[networkBoy]

My old 3.4GHz prescott system[1] used all of 750+ watts at full tilt and about 500 watts idle.
My new systems combined[2] use just shy of 380 watts at idle (have not measured full load yet).
so, yeah old computers draw a hell of a lot more power and are not worth the cost of keeping them on (or cooling the air in the summer).

[1]: P4 Prescott 3.4 GHz
2 gig DDR 533 ram
2x250 gig HDD
ATI mid level PEG card
intel 915 chipset based ASUS board

[2]a: core2quad 9600
4 gig DDR2 1066
9 hdds (750 gig through 2 TB)
1 SSD
raid controller
intel 945 based board with internal graphics (ASUS)

b: core2quad 9750
16 gig ddr2 1333
2 hdd (15K)
1 SSD
nVidia 9400
intel P45 based system (foxconn)

Re:I think it's a good question.

[networkBoy]

did you figure in the cost of air-con in the summer time (and possibly winter depending on where you live)?

Re:I think it's a good question.

[PsychoElf]

I've got an N450 Atom netbook that outperforms my old Pentium M 1.5ghz laptop by leaps and bounds. Granted the bus speed is much faster too now, but I can run Firefox with a bunch of tabs, encode a DVD to xvid and preview another DVD iso without everything stuttering. So to the point...you are right on about the Atom. More power and a lot less watts being used. If you have the money, upgrade and follow the three R's for your old junk (junk is ((a))relative).

Re:I think it's a good question.

[Anonymous Coward]

just man up and don't offer to support it, tell them its junk when u give it out and say its a "no strings attached" type deal.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[Artifakt]

The direct energy costs of old gear can certainly be higher, and don't usually make a good argument for saving it, but figuring total energy costs, as including clean up of toxics in the old gear, will usually tip the balance.
      Some of it is about where you use the item, for example a CRT will inevitably use a lot more power than an LCD or other thinscreen, so much that it's probably the worst case on energy savings - but even there, what if you hook the CRT to a server where it seldom needs to be active? It's an alternative to going headless and remotely administering the machine, and some machines/OSs need the alternative.
        What happens if you add a huge old full color monitor to a camera security array, where you normally watch everything in six or eight small B & W windows on one more modern monitor, but occasionally have a need to pipe one view onto a larger screen for review? You only need it to look back at a recorded image, say of a possible shoplifing, in rare cases where the normal image was vague and you want to be sure you saw what you thought you did, or that your evidence is up to proceeding in court, situations such as that.
        How often would you need to fire up the screen for a dedicated music computer that's part of your stereo - half an hour per day or less to make a massive playlist, and a few minutes to load a new one once you have a few made, then it's off again? Delaying having to junk that old CRT by a few years, until it actually burns out, and giving your area time to build better recycling facilities, might even be worth it from a pure energy standpoint for this worst case.
      Right now, I assume that floppy drives, zip, 120's, most tape drives and such are not worth the bother, but it might be worth preserving a CD writer (not a basic reader). Exceptionally small CRT monitors can be more useful than standard sizes - a boxy 12 inch diagonal vrs. a much lighter 17 inch thinscreen sounds like no contest, but realworld spaces are 3D, and the old monitor may fit conveniently where the newer one's 2 D profile doesn't.
      USB 2 and 3 didn't make USB 1/1.1 obsolete at all. Some devices simply don't need fast.
      Whole older boxes staying useful sometimes depends as much on space as power. If there's a big basement and you can set up a LAN, a bunch of P2s can run one heck of a lan party with old copies of Quake or new ones of Openarena, or even go back to Hexen or Doom 2. I've seen this at the level of a college dorm with an unused meeting room where every box has pretty modern hardware graphics acceleration, and alternately at the level of a boyscout troop that was running kid friendly lan-parties on 400 Mhz Pentium 2s and AMDs mixed.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[lizardb0y]

On the other hand I won't take anything greater than a 486. Older computers are just more fun.

Wow. I won't take on x86 machines at all - with the occasional exception like the Atari Portfolio. What's interesting about a 486 when there's such a diverse faunæ of old 8 bit beasts to be had?

Re:I think it's a good question.

[jawtheshark]

My math might be a bit off... Let's think... I joined the company I work now for in March 2009. I gave the equipment shortly before, so it must have been 8.10. As far as I can count, that's a little over a year without tech support.

I have other machines in the field where tech support is very occasional. The art is to setup the machine in such a way that all you cover all needs you can anticipate. (So make sure it does play DVDs, for example).

For this particular instance, they might have found someone else who installed Windows instead, but I made clear I only would support Ubuntu. Which, for the record, was very positively adopted by the girl as per her mother. Somehow it not being Windows was "cool"... How times have changed.

I do have the t-shirt mentioned below, and I like to wear it when helping people with their computer problems. A bit as an in-joke.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[jawtheshark]

I have bailed out my father in law with an old P-I 166MHz. The old PS/2 connected to some lathe failed and I had nothing lower than that in stock. Dumped FreeDOS on it, the software to control the lathe and my job was done. So, yes, it is possible... BUT... My limitation is my space to stock old stuff. So, I keep always the best 4 to 5 machines because that's my top limit I can stock up. If they fall below that threshold, I disassemble them and keeps parts, the rest is hauled to the recycling centre.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[jawtheshark]

The number of older machines that can save juice is somewhere between zero and none if they're 32-bit or less."

Yes, but they don't use all that much to begin with. I have a P-III 800MHz server, full-SCSI and 768MB RAM. It's my parents server. It uses around ~40W at the socket. That is very very reasonable.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[rduke15]

The English Wikipedia entry seems to confuse Third World with the countries of the Non-Aligned Movement. This confusion doesn't appear in the French version, and the French article on Alfred Sauvy (who originally coined the expression) also mentions this frequent misunderstanding.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I live in a "sorry, developing nation" and we don't want your old crap. Seriously we live on the same planet, use the same Internet, and use the same software. What makes you think we need old tech?

Actually the last thing we need is one more container of, ready to die, networking equipment. They are highly toxic an will end up on the side of the road since we have no money to bury them. Do us a favor and keep your trash home. PLEASE.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[Urza9814]

But stuff that's just slow by modern standards, like 802.11b gear, may well find a happy owner in someone who ideologically likes recycling and doesn't need more speed (and quite a few people don't).

I know this is probably entirely unnecessary, but I feel it's good to point out that even 802.11b equipment is going to be faster than most people's home internet connections (assuming you're in the US anyway)...so for people who aren't transferring files between PCs on WiFi (aka 90%+ of users), the only difference between b and g is the range. So assuming it's not too energy efficient, anyone with a low income would probably be just as happy with b as they would with g.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[Hatta]

Oh certainly. 8-bits are a ton of fun, I have several. Still, the early x86s hold the most nostalgia for me. I just picked up a Tandy 1000ex, and I'm dying to check out the old Sierra games I played in hi-res Tandy mode. Great fun.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[Anonymous Coward]

So those dirty heathens should just compute with chalk until they lift themselves up to our level? Send a bunny suit and cleanup kit with each computer.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[Anonymous Coward]

The other option would be to re-use it for people you can help in the low-income bracket. An older P-III laptop with a 802.11b card and a 802.11b router/access point is better than no gear at all. Still, my experience says that most people -even those in the lower income bracket- don't want the old gear at all.

An alternative is donating it to charity. Some of them will probably take it and either give it away or set it up for use somewhere.

Charities involving third-world countries (sorry, "developing nations") may be a particularly grateful bunch, even for old equipment.

I hate to use all caps but
SELL THE COMPUTERS TO YOUR LOCAL RECYCLER!!!
Seriously, one nearby my house buys the parts for 20+ cents a lb. and I sold ram at $2+ a lb on eBay to people who extract the gold, etc.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[tapanitarvainen]

did you figure in the cost of air-con in the summer time (and possibly winter depending on where you live)?

That's a good point. Where I live (about 62 degrees North) air conditioning isn't much of an issue, but heating is, and I've always tried to take that into account when doing power savings calculations and measurements. Hatta is right that surprisingly often old boxes turn out to be more efficient in the end - but not always. You really need to do the measurements and calculations to know, and sometimes results may be surprising.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[Khyber]

Ten thousand times *THIS*

Seriously, just recycle the shit since we have the facilities to do so.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[Vectormatic]

The mere fact that guy is posting online indicates he HAS a computer and the networking gear to connect it all up, many people dont.

There are charities which gather up old (often ex office equipment) computers, set them up and ship them to africa to be used in schools, i would imagine they would welcome some free networking gear so some form of network can be established. At the very least ask those organisations, they know what is needed down there

Re:I think it's a good question.

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to break it to you but 1.5kW power supplies are not worth it for 99% of people. Most people wont even need 750Ws. My current computer (middle of the line quad core, 4gb ram, 2x sata hdd and a hd4760) can run fine on a 350W psu (although due to the effects of aging, it currently has a 450W psu).
Unless you are running multiple video cards in the high range of things or running lots of harddrives, a 500W psu will easily supply your computer with all its power needs.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[wall0159]

>> running Ubuntu 8.10

your question is already answered.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[wall0159]

It might make economic sense to buy a new more efficient computer to make savings on your electricity bills, but it's probably still worse environmentally. The amount of power and water used in the manufacture of an average PC is large, and is a cost that is not truly passed-on to the purchaser.
I'm not saying don't buy new PCs because of this, just don't do it thinking it's better for the environment.

"Gartner maintains that the PC manufacturing process accounts for 70 % of the natural resources used in the life cycle of a PC"
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_computing

(similarly, buying a new Prius and claiming you're "doing your bit" for the environment is not true, unless you had to buy a new car anyway.)

Re:I think it's a good question.

[digitalchinky]

I concur - myself working for one of these 3rd world charities I want to say "We do not want your junk!" If you don't want it, then very probably we don't either. As a charity we want to give the same experience to our beneficiaries as one would have in any relatively affluent society. We don't want to be a dumping ground for corporate waste, which is what some of you (maybe not you specifically) see as a nice, cheap, and handy alternative to the usual costly disposal process. Like other posters said, if we end up with it for whatever reason, we'll basically trash it too. Maybe we can recycle some of the plastics, but PCB's, not so much.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't take nerve to wear that. I wear mine to work (IT Support in a University) quite regularly. It helps with the feeling of guilt that it was a birthday present from my boss (the Networked Systems Manager) so if he thinks it's appropriate then who am I to argue?

Doesn't actually stop anyone asking me though, just that now they do it while laughing, and apparently without any irony.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[William-Ely]

He should use the 802.11b gear to troll his neighbors by reducing their bandwidth. The SSID should be something like "Hai Im In Ur Air Wavez Slowin Ur Downloadz" for full troll effect.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[Omestes]

The other option would be to re-use it for people you can help in the low-income bracket.... Still, my experience says that most people -even those in the lower income bracket- don't want the old gear.

How low of an income are we talking? A 802.11g router is pretty much dirt cheap these days. A quick search on Newegg shows that you can even get n and draft-n routers for around $25 (of dubious quality, sure...). You can pretty much equip two computers (including the router) with greater-than-b wifi for around $70, which in the world of computing isn't bad.

If they are poor enough where the cost of a cheap router is beyond their means, a free router won't help much, since half the price of equipping a wireless network is equipping the PCs with wifi cards/dongles.

Also, does a low income family need wifi? Can they afford a laptop? Do they have broadband? Etc... Probably not.

Though, if it is a low income family with children give the hardware to them anyways, let their children rip them apart and have some fun.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are replying to khyber kitsune's ignorant shit, dont bother.

ebay

[kaptink]

Simple

Just like any other crap, bundle it all up and put it on ebay. The alternative is landfill.

Re:ebay

[tiberus]

The alternative is landfill.

Of course you meant to say recycle it.

Re:ebay

[hedwards]

Or in civilized parts of the world return them for recycling. I'm not sure about the rest of the country how yous handle it, but here in WA you can take that stuff back to pretty much any major electronics retailer and they'll recycle it for free. Since around here manufacturers have to pay for recycling, all we have to do is drop it off and they cover the tab. Sure we ultimately pay for it ourselves, but having the manufacturers handle it ensure that it's done efficiently.

Re:ebay

[Andy Dodd]

Or ensure that it gets sent to a landfill in China... :(

Apparently a lot of stuff destined for "recycling" winds up in one of the most polluted towns in the world instead.

Re:ebay

[Anonymous Cowpat]

Sure we ultimately pay for it ourselves, but having the manufacturers handle it ensure that it's done efficiently.

In fact, since you already paid for it when you bought it, you might as well get your money's worth.

Re:ebay

[oh-dark-thirty]

...and start the bidding at penny with no reserve; you will probably be shocked at how much someone would be willing to pay for landfill material..

Re:ebay

[Anonymous Coward]

and they'll recycle it for free.

In my country, not giving your customers the option to take back junk for recycling (for free) is punishable by law.

Re:ebay

[X0563511]

Yes. Someone will want it, either HAM-types looking for antennas or other 2.4ghz components, people on an extreme budget etc.

honey pot

[Anonymous Coward]

Honey pot

Re:honey pot

[Ponder Stibions]

Seconded. Set up the system, practice hacking WEP, run a honey pot, use it to infect stupid users who connect to anything open......

Sell or donate

[yogidog98]

Sell it on craigslist or ebay, or donate it to charity and buy a stick of gum with the tax deduction.

tags

[Anonymous Coward]

Why isn't this tagged "doorstopper"?

Dump it in the garden

[ZackSchil]

Throw it away and don't feel bad about it. New Jersey isn't even at 10% capacity yet.

Re:Dump it in the garden

[ma3382]

Name your source. Pretty sure New Jersey is just as full as the rest of the trashy states.

Re:Dump it in the garden

[wonkavader]

I know this guy. He says NJ is 9.46% full. He's a guy who knows these things.

He suggests you place the cards in the trunk of a older domestic vehicle, then have the car crushed into a cube. That cube will be melted down and recycled. This is, he says, a way to keep our beautiful state from becoming too full of... "network cards". And since the "network cards" get recycled, it is also good for the environment.

If you're squeamish, he could do it for you, for the right price.

Re:Dump it in the garden

[damnfuct]

Don't forget that we haven't even begun to tap the huge garbage-dump potential of the grand canyon.

Re:Dump it in the garden

[Low Ranked Craig]

I've seen Jersey Shore. I'd have to say that Jersey is full up.

Re:Dump it in the garden

[wed128]

those douchebags aren't even from new jersey...

Re:Dump it in the garden

[spidkit]

Composting works best with smaller pieces.

Re:Dump it in the garden

[Anonymous Coward]

I found it slightly alarming that your user name, won kavader, sounds an awful lot like won cadaver...

Electronic Recycling

[0racle]

If it is not useful to yourself or anyone you know don't just throw it away, find a local electronic recycling depot. In some places that can be hard, but at least if you have a Best Buy near you they will take it.

Re:Electronic Recycling

[Voyager529]

When I've researched the electronic recycling services, many seem to charge to take your gear. Even the one or two I recall that would take your stuff would make you pay for shipping. For the PCMCIA cards that may be a trivial amount, but depending on how much gear you've got and how much it weighs, it can add up fast.

Like was said in the summary, the routers would be to (optionally) add alternative firmware on them and repurpose them as a firewall or network switch. the PCMCIA cards either pay for recycling, sell on eBay, donate to charity, or throw away. IME that pretty much sums up the options.

Re:Electronic Recycling

[toxonix]

Best buy will take it. And throw it away for you so you don't feel bad. (this is not a fact, just speculation)

Re:Electronic Recycling

[TooMuchToDo]

The value of the materials you get out of the recycling aren't worth enough to sustain the recycling business on it's own, hence the cost. Shipping is a couple of bucks via USPS and typical recycling cost is 25 cents/pound.

Best Answer

[Anonymous Coward]

Free Wifi for the homeless

Trash them or donate them!

[Tirs]

I agree. Trash them, same as you trashed your {2|3|4}86 boxes and your {MSDOS|WIN31} floppy disks.

An alternative is to donate them to some non-profit organisation which sends them to third-world countries; imagine for example how a Haiti school could benefit from some wifi equipment (provided, of course, the NPO also gets a few computers for them!)

Re:Trash them or donate them!

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. Trash them, same as you trashed your {2|3|4}86 boxes and your {MSDOS|WIN31} floppy disks.

I still have all of those, you insensitive clod!

Re:Trash them or donate them!

[damnfuct]

OMG better save your Athlon XP chips because they are about as valuable as your 802.11b equipment.

Re:Trash them or donate them!

[skydyr]

Chances are they'd be useless to a Haitian school too. When you're struggling to find a building to hold school in, you generally don't have time or money to worry about setting up a wifi link to your internet connection.

Re:Trash them or donate them!

[Tirs]

Yes I do. Did you really read my message?

Re:Trash them or donate them!

[Tirs]

1) Barracks.

2) Everything, each thing, counts and helps.

3) Haiti was just an example. In theory NPOs send stuff to places where they are needed, so they should take care of deciding whether Haiti or (let's say) Madagascar, but the important thing is, they need to have something to send.

Re:Trash them or donate them!

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF are you doing in my trash!? Who are you, Oscar the Grouch?

Re:Trash them or donate them!

[aradnik]

modded funny? am i missing something? o_O

Re:Trash them or donate them!

[cHiphead]

Just get married, your wife will make the decision for you. Or move across country with a house full of furniture. Or both. ;)

(I once had a garage full of old equipment, marriage corrected that down to 2 laptops and a media server on the tv)

Re:Trash them or donate them!

[Omestes]

Or move across country with a house full of furniture

Oddly, when we recently moved I discovered MORE obsolete tech. I lost some useful things, but managed to discover even more useless cruft.

Just get married, your wife will make the decision for you.

Not married, but my long term lady-friend/sin-mate is sadly tolerant of my obsolete tech hording, even volunteering more of her own closet space to store mothballed computers. She even thinks its a great idea to make a mosaic on the garage wall out of old mother boards, peripherals and a cache of 5 1/4 floppies that I recently discovered shoved into one of my old tool boxes.

Then again she also let me take up half the bedroom with a retro gaming center, after co-opting my rediscovered C64 for 3 hours to play Qix.

Oddly tolerant for a non-geek.

Donate it to the third world !

[assemblerex]

http://www.computeraid.org/ refurbishes and ships this stuff to africa and beyond!

Re:Donate it to the third world !

[damnfuct]

...where they return to our lives through 419 scams!

Re:Donate it to the third world !

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.computeraid.org/ refurbishes and ships this stuff to africa and beyond!

...Where they beat it with rocks to rescue the tiny bits of gold inside, and throw the rest in a pit somewhere. Edward Burtynsky showed me this, in bright stunning detail. I hope the systems would find their way to a useful home, but the odds are slim.

PULL!

[Anonymous Coward]

BANG!

Nerd skeet shooting

Freecycle

[Myopic]

When you don't want old computer equipment, you give it away on your local Freecycle. I thought everyone knew that.

NB: does not work with CRT monitors.

Re:Freecycle

[flippy10]

Yeah. If you want to get rid of CRTs... you might have to end up PAYING someone to take it away.

Re:Freecycle

[noidentity]

Craigslist also has a section for free items.

Re:Freecycle

[Anonymous Coward]

> NB: does not work with CRT monitors.

Not true. Someone came to pick up and old CRT (20") which worked. He was just fixing up a friends computer and they had no funds... Now we are all happy.

Re:Freecycle

[east coast]

Goodwill took an old 17 inch CRT from me just a few months ago, no questions asked. It still had some life to it but not much. The guy didn't seem to care either way.

Re:Freecycle

[flippy10]

Hmmm... Might have to try that. I'm sure somebody out there needs 'em right?

Re:Freecycle

[themib]

I've been a member of Freecycle (http://www.freecycle.org/) for a while now, and I've gotten rid of a lot of my older technology that way. I totally recommend it. :)

Re:Freecycle

[Low Ranked Craig]

CRTs respond quite well to a 30-06 or a dear slug...

Re:Freecycle

[Hatta]

I was at a salvation army last weekend. 10 CRT monitors for the price of 1.

Re:Freecycle

[Just Some Guy]

Not as long as Wal-Mart has a dumpster out back, I won't.

Re:Freecycle

[tiptone]

We had a community garage sale a few weeks back, where you leave anything that doesn't sell in a box out at the street and a donation truck comes by in the evening and picks it all up. I had a 15 or 17" CRT that had been laying around for years that didn't go for $5 in the garage sale, but disappeared from the donation box before the truck showed up to pick it up. I'm not sure if somebody needs 'em, but somebody is taking 'em just the same. :)

Re:Freecycle

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear slugs are too valuable to waste on CRTs, or even deer.

Re:Freecycle

[Quirkz]

I just dropped off two old ones at Best Buy, who recycled them for me. I DID have to pay ($10 per monitor) but in exchange they gave me two $10 gift certificates. So basically they'll recycle a monitor for free as long as you're willing to spend $10 in their store.

Considering my next best option was a local recycle center that would charge me $25 per monitor and give me nothing back (except a sense of civic pride?), it seemed like a no-brainer to me.

Re:Freecycle

[Anonymous Coward]

I've gotten rid of 4 CRT monitors through Freecycle. I had an art student pick up 2 of them to use for a project, and the other two got picked up by people from non-profits.

Re:Freecycle

[b0bby]

Yes, and I even get rid of CRTs through Craigslist. I'm amazed at what people will come and take.

Re:Freecycle

[Anonymous Coward]

I've actually had luck getting rid of a CRT, even with the caveat that I only wanted to give it to a worthy cause of some sort (like a school or church or synagogue or something). It was a 21 incher I paid 800 for, so I didn't really want to give it away to some punk kids who'd just smash it in the bike tunnel for fun.

Re:Freecycle

[networkBoy]

Funny.
We had a garbage pickup on my street where you can leave out old appliances to be picked up, trash, etc.

I put out an old washing machine and a microwave that would turn on if you opened the door (talk about safety interlock failure!). I also put out two moldy bales of alfalfa that reeked to high heaven and had maggots on them.

Following morning as I went to work I expected the appliances to be gone. They were still there, but the moldy alfalfa was gone...
WTF?
-nB

Re:Freecycle

[Reed Solomon]

Freecycle is crap because they're all clogged with people begging for free stuff and not enough people just giving away free crap.

I don't care if you need a giant statue of elvis, even if I have 3. I'm not giving it to you because you annoy me. There should be a separate group for those people.

Re:Freecycle

[Myopic]

Seriously. Back in 2004 I lived in Boston and somebody posted "WANTED: World Series tickets." The email read "Please give me a miracle." I responded with "WANTED: $100 MILLION DOLLARS", "Please give me a miracle".

[Context for the uninitiated: in 2004 the Boston Red Sox defied all odds and won the baseball World Series for the first time since the Woodrow Wilson administration. Tickets to the series were probably worth tens of thousands of dollars each.]

Look, if you need a set of plates or some used t-shirts, post a WANTED. If you need a car, tickets to a major sporting event, or anything else extravagant, then get a fucking job and save up.

Re:Freecycle

[uncqual]

I never thought of slugs as "dear" - I usually reserve such terms for GFs and wives. But, I guess, each to their own.

Re:Freecycle

[noidentity]

It's good to have at least one backup monitor in case your primary fails. That way you don't have to get a replacement immediately, so you can look around for the best deal. I keep an old 15" CRT around for that purpose, as it's not too big. Or maybe you've got a closet computer and would like a monitor to turn on occasionally. They just don't make sense for continuous use, due to the cost of electricity. Having recently finally gotten an LCD, I was quite impressed at the quality, especially over VGA. Maybe others are like I was, thinking LCDs won't look as good.

Re:Freecycle

[Low Ranked Craig]

I sleep with mine under my pillow

Re:Freecycle

[unitron]

Isn't "dear slug" the proper way to begin a letter to your congresscritter?

Re:Freecycle

[b0bby]

Ahh, I'm over keeping old stuff around just in case. I'd rather someone else get some use out of it now, than worry that my monitor will fail sometime in the next few years. Newegg will have one out to me next day, and meanwhile I can VNC from my netbook if I really need to. I find that the less stuff I have around my house, the happier I am.

Re:Freecycle

[ColMstrd]

that moldy alfafa will have made really nice mulch/compost for growing veg. Your old computers on the other hand are destined to pollute a water table somewhere.

Re:Freecycle

[cffrost]

Yeah. If you want to get rid of CRTs... you might have to end up PAYING someone to take it away.

Bullshit... Take it to a place that buys and sells junk. Just put it in the parking lot at Walmart.

mischeif

[SethJohnson]

Set the WIFI broadcast name of the router to something like, "George Hamilton cheated on his SATs!" where "George Hamilton" = your boss's name. Take it to work, plug it in, and hide it under your desk or someone else's. Can be used for all kinds of passive-aggressive complaining at work.

Re:mischeif

[Anonymous Coward]

What about those of us who don't work for George Hamilton?

Re:mischeif

[farnsworth]

See also: "We can hear you..."

Re:mischeif

[Anonymous Coward]

If the area isn't dense with Wi-Fi APs, that might be humorous, may crowd out existing traffic, so at least do a scan first and check if there is enough free bandwidth before sticking APs up.

Of course, having an SSID up with a transparent proxy (routing Web page traffic and doing the mischief of your choice) makes a great honeypot system, especially if you slap WEP on it, so wardrivers have something to attack.

Re:mischeif

[dnahelicase]

This is a great idea!

But seriously, there are all sorts of applications for "b" wireless equipment. Sure, you can crack WEP, but it's still effective against 99% of the population that will come across it. I never have old wireless routers that still work in my junk pile, because they are still completely useful.

There are a lot of people that "just want wireless" that have

I bet they would be grabbed on freecycle in no time

think local

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash it with something like DD-WRT that will let you use better encryption and allow for mesh networking, then get together with your local community and help them setup a community based wireless mesh network from your donation and other locals who have extra tech lying around unused.

Metro WiFi

[Anonymous Coward]

One great thing about 802.11b was the range. Grab some pringles cans, make some antennas, and start a neighborhood wifi co-op where everyone shares their broadband connections in exchange for access.

Weird Stuff Warehouse

[Animats]

In Silicon Valley, you take stuff like that to Weird Stuff Warehouse, which handles both surplus and electronics recycling. They're more into commercial gear, though; if you want previous-generation 1U servers, they have plenty.

Hoarders...

[PPalmgren]

Where's a link to an IT Hoarders episode when you need it? (damn work firewall)

Try updating firmware of routers and cards

[mastropiero]

WPA with TKIP is compatible with a number of .11b devices. A firmware/driver upgrade is usually what you need to support it.

If that doesn't work, then recycle them.

Still Could Be Pretty Useful, I Say.

[flippy10]

Don't throw it out. Make a secondary network for music streaming. Compatibility permitting, put OpenWRT onto the router(s). Make a WAP for your car. Portable WAP via a small power supply. Practice cracking WEP keys. Annoy people by leaving it unsecured, but not connected to the Internet. Give it to someone who needs it. Turn off the wireless and create a protected subnet on your network. Make it make you toast. Set it up and yell at it when you get angry. Routers are tough, they can take it.

Re:Still Could Be Pretty Useful, I Say.

[langelgjm]

Practice cracking WEP keys.

I just use other people's default FIOS installations for that.

Re:Still Could Be Pretty Useful, I Say.

[damnfuct]

Annoy people by leaving it unsecured, but not connected to the Internet.

hahahahaha.. Or somehow set it up so it only allows the user to go to some lame website.

Re:Still Could Be Pretty Useful, I Say.

[godrik]

like goatse

Re:Still Could Be Pretty Useful, I Say.

[apoc.famine]

Annoy people by leaving it unsecured, but not connected to the Internet.

No, that's just wrong.

Annoying) Mess with their surfing.
Really annoying) Do so randomly.
Evil) Same sort of idea using iptables, but instead of flipping html, slowly degrade speeds over the course of a couple of minutes.
Satanic) Replace 10% of their images with goatse.

Re:Still Could Be Pretty Useful, I Say.

[blair1q]

Annoy people by leaving it unsecured, but not connected to the Internet.

Mine's like that by default. Thanks, Cox, for sucking in a way that makes me look sardonic.

Re:Still Could Be Pretty Useful, I Say.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://evilscheme.org/defcon/

Re:Still Could Be Pretty Useful, I Say.

[GeekishYogi]

Thank you flippy. It's the end of the day and this made me smile.

Re:Still Could Be Pretty Useful, I Say.

[Anonymous Coward]

Could also be good for tinkering: Network aware robotics, wireless smart-home configuration (having an independent automation network = cool!)

Freegeek

[GlowinOrb]

If you happen to be in Portland, Freegeek does good things with your old stuff.

Re:Freegeek

[vnaughtdeltat]

There's a Freegeek in Chicago too.

802.11b has WPA

[stas2k]

Actually 802.11b has WPA support albeit only with TKIP ecncryption. It worked for me on linux prism hostap drivers after I updated card's firmware. So maybe you could use it, you don't need much bandwith if you just browse and SSH from your wireless devices. :)

Re:802.11b has WPA

[Anonymous Coward]

Security Issues with TKIP

Use it for free wifi perhaps.

[PeopleMakeMeLOL]

If you know the owner of a business such as a hotel, coffee shop, fast food place etc, donate it to them. They can be easily configured to make sure the entire area is saturated, and with DD-WRT you could block workgroups [or anything for that matter] as well as set them up on different channels but same SSIDs. For just web browsing it would do fair enough IMHO.

Range

[Anonymous Coward]

If range is what you're after, 802.11b has g and especially n beat. The routers with their limited encryption support are probably worthless, but USB adapters are definately still useful. Of course b is useless for file sharing but it should be fine with e.g. VNC and VoIP.

Three Rs

[xaxa]

Reduce -- too late, you presumably already have replacements
Reuse -- Freecycle etc, charities,
Recycle -- last option.

Should support WPA if they support WEP

[Bacon Bits]

WPA was designed as an intermediate standard which would function on WEP-only hardware. That's why WPA uses TKIP instead of AES (which is what WPA2 uses). The devices may require firmware updates (which, of course, may not exist or may no longer be available) but the hardware itself is capable of WPA.

Re:Should support WPA if they support WEP

[jbigboote]

WPA was designed as an intermediate standard which would function on WEP-only hardware. That's why WPA uses TKIP instead of AES (which is what WPA2 uses). The devices may require firmware updates (which, of course, may not exist or may no longer be available) but the hardware itself is capable of WPA.

tell that to my Linksys WCG200. there are no firmware updates to give it WPA, though it is 802.11g. I have the original two-antenna model, and bought it myself, so my cable company has no claim on it. I really like the design, but there are very few all-in-one solutions for cable broadband, and none use 802.11n yet, so I am finding it hard to justify upgrading.

Free Geek the stuff

[psyopper]

Please don't bin the stuff, it's horribly contaminant to the environment. Recycle it through your local electronics recycler, in Portland we have a non-profit called Free Geek that will even work to give it a second life before it gets tossed. - www.freegeek.org

Turn off the Wireless

[Reed Solomon]

you can usually turn off the wireless on most wireless routers and just use it as a regular old wired router, if it comes to that. but other than that, im sure you can donate it to the goodwill. I love goodwill. I got me a Samsung HT-XQ100 with digital optical in and a center speaker bar for $13 the other day and it works great for decoding digital audio from my WDTV box.. the only thing that didn't work was the DVD player doesn't load CD's or DVD's.. oh well, already got a DVD player anyways.. also got a famiclone for $1.50, whee... I don't need an 802.11b router, but there must be someone out there who could either use one of might enjoy hacking one to death.

In the San Francisco area

[Megahard]

Donate to ACCRC. A recycling shop run by Linux geeks.

Anything not broken

[node_chomsky]

... should not be thrown in the trash. (and broken things should be fixed) I am certain someone who has far less toys than you do can actually put it to better use than you ever did. It's amazing how much we take our own access to communications technology for granted. I am certainly against hoarding and excessive consumerism, I simply think we should make better use of what we already have before we start throwing perfectly good gear in the trash. Many old wireless routers can be made useful again with an alternative firmware like dd-wrt. I am using older routers as repeaters around my house to extend my network's range. Security isn't as tight as it could be, but certainly effective enough for my concerns and circumstances.

What to do with a hammer?

[Korbeau]

I've come across a hammer in my toolbox. Any idea what I could do with it? Is it worth any time putting it to use, or should I just leave it in my toolbox?

(PS: aside from being cynical, this post also answers the OP question - using 802.11b equipment along with a hammer can be a whole-lotta fun ;)

Don't donate it!

[jmaslak]

Trash it (well, recycle it anyhow). Nobody wants the junk. Seriously.

The idea that some third world country is grateful to get insecure, unstable, junk computer equipment...well, that's offensive. Rather than shipping your toxic (literally) junk halfway around the world, if you want to support computers in third world countries (hint: more than 802.11b access points, they need things like water and sewage), simply donate MONEY to an organization that is involved in these things. If education and improving the world is your goal, I'd recommend Unicef.

Also, 802.11b uses radio, which means it needs to comply with whatever country's laws you send it to. US channels are not necessarily the third world's channels, and it's best to actually work with the government rather than assuming "They should be grateful weather or not is compatible with their usage of radio spectrum - Look at me, the rich person, doing nothing about their hunger, but giving them my trash I'm too cheap to recycle!"

I've worked for non-profits, the other suggestion here. We had lots of people offer us worthless junk for tax write-off purposes. Apparently our mission was not important enough to have reliable computer equipment (we only fed the hungry, so we apparently, unlike business, didn't need a computer with things like a warranty). Anytime you have "free" equipment, if you don't have a plan in place to replace/repair it when it breaks, it's not worth having - because you will end up depending on the equipment, which will be a disaster when it fails (and you have no money to fix it).

Re:Don't donate it!

[Darkness404]

simply donate MONEY to an organization that is involved in these things.

Yeah, because we all know that money goes directly to the people you want to help... (yes, there are some good charities but the vast majority puts most of the money in administrative fees or gets hung up somewhere)

Look at me, the rich person, doing nothing about their hunger, but giving them my trash I'm too cheap to recycle!"

This attitude is the reason why most people don't donate to the homeless or charities, if I have excess stuff that is working, someone can probably use it that isn't me. If I have money, I can use it because most of us don't have much of it at the moment.

Plus, there are a lot of countries where the people are just poor, not starving, but just poor and really, old computer equipment could probably help them escape poverty. I know I got my start in computers by playing with old hardware then figuring out what made them work and changing it, chances are someone poor can do that too.

Anytime you have "free" equipment, if you don't have a plan in place to replace/repair it when it breaks, it's not worth having - because you will end up depending on the equipment, which will be a disaster when it fails (and you have no money to fix it).

Just learn how to salvage. The majority of my desktops were built from old parts found for $.50 at a garage sale, an old HDD there, an optical drive here, etc. just wipe whatever OS is on there and replace it with a suitable replacement. Puppy Linux is always a good bet.

Re:Don't donate it!

[Whorhay]

The warranty bit in particular amused me. The only thing I would ever expect to need a warranty on is equipment that is broken on arrival. Maintaining ones equipment or tools should be part and parcel of any person's job.

Re:Don't donate it!

[westlake]

Yeah, because we all know that money goes directly to the people you want to help... (yes, there are some good charities but the vast majority puts most of the money in administrative fees or gets hung up somewhere)
I know I got my start in computers by playing with old hardware then figuring out what made them work and changing it, chances are someone poor can do that too

Hardware that has be repaired, re-packaged and shipped thousands of miles.

Hardware that has to clear customs.

Hardware that is heavy-weight, bulky, fragile and power hungry.

Processing the geek's cast-off junk has very real costs in legal expenses, administration, labor, transport, storage, etc.

Re:Don't donate it!

[Stray7Xi]

Anytime you have "free" equipment, if you don't have a plan in place to replace/repair it when it breaks, it's not worth having - because you will end up depending on the equipment, which will be a disaster when it fails (and you have no money to fix it).

Just learn how to salvage. The majority of my desktops were built from old parts found for $.50 at a garage sale, an old HDD there, an optical drive here, etc. just wipe whatever OS is on there and replace it with a suitable replacement. Puppy Linux is always a good bet.

Are you donating your time to fix it? It's not the equipment that's the problem, they have a glut of junk. The problem is getting the people to support the junk with hundreds of different hardware configurations. A one-off configuration of obsolete hardware is not a gift, it's a liability. If you can donate at least a dozen of the same device, go for it.

Re:Don't donate it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Anytime you have "free" equipment, if you don't have a plan in place to replace/repair it when it breaks, it's not worth having - because you will end up depending on the equipment, which will be a disaster when it fails (and you have no money to fix it).

Idiots like you throw away so much perfectly good equipment that the only plan I need when things break is "get another one for free." So by all means keep it up.

Re:Don't donate it!

[Anonymous Coward]

if you want to support computers in third world countries (hint: more than 802.11b access points, they need things like water and sewage), simply donate MONEY

Hint: They don't need money either, they need things like water and sewage.

Re:Don't donate it!

[Anonymous Coward]

(hint: more than 802.11b access points, they need things like water and sewage), simply donate MONEY to an organization that is involved in these things.

Third world countries need our sewage? Can't they just make there own? What organization buys sewage and ships it to Third world countries?

IPSec

[devaaasimon]

You can always set up the routers in no-security mode and then make the clients use IPSec http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipsec
If you connect to the internet via a software router it is even possible to disallow any connections out-of-the-house without proper authentication.

Africa

[Anonymous Coward]

I spent a fair bit of time in Africa, and I couldn't believe the junk they begged me to try to resurrect because they were so desperate for tech. If there was someone who would pay for a cargo ship to go to Africa, then we should give all our old but still good tech to them. It will actually be put to use rather than sitting in a closet until it is finally trashed.

At some point old stuff becomes trash

[Toasterboy]

At some point, the hassle of working with old junk and making it work, putting up with how slow it is, dealing with failing electronics, and so forth isn't worth it.

I have 17 Pentium 3 class systems in my basement in a render farm. Sure, it's neat to have so many systems. But for my purpose, a single $300 quad core box literally has more compute power, more memory, more memory bandwidth, and uses way less electricity. Plus you don't have to maintain a billion systems. And it takes up less space. And there's no heat problem. I haven't replaced the pile yet, because I'm not doing that much 3D lately, but I will, and it will be awesome to be rid of so much clutter. I also have a bunch of Sun boxes. They were fun to get working, but they use too much power, and it's an absolute hassle to fiddle with them, maintain software on several platforms, and so forth. My free time is valuable; I don't want to waste it doing menial maintenence on crappy hardware.

Off brand low end consumer gear is barely designed to last 3 years, let alone past life expectancy. Most of that 802.11b gear is pretty limited in what it can do, and barely worked when it was new. It's not like you can install dd-wrt and turn them into a mesh.

Best case scenario is probably hooking up somebody who has no wireless and no resources up, like your local church or whatever. If it breaks, meh, they had low expectations to begin with. It may not even be worth doing that though, because a lot of older consumer routers break when subjected to the network behavior of newer versions of Windows because they can't handle scaling window sizes with the default settings, and it's a support chore to dink around with the settings on every machine that comes along in a non-enterprise environment.

Bottom line is that old junk starts costing you more to use than buying new stuff would.

Re:At some point old stuff becomes trash

[ducomputergeek]

I used to have a shelf of Mac Mini's for the same purpose (playing with Xgrid) that I picked up off Ebay cheap over the years. A storm last year pretty much leveled my house and everything was a total loss. I bought a single new MacMini that I use as a media center hooked up to the TV. I even got rid of the MBP for an iPad.

The only thing I remotely miss is that I had a Dual Alpha 500Mhz tower with NT 4 for Alpha and Lightwave 5 that I had picked up from some company being liquidated around 2002.

Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

You could always start a company and sell it for 10 times its worth, just like Apple.

If it has a router, disable wireless

[noidentity]

If it's a wireless router, disable the wireless and keep it around as a backup router in case another fails, or as one to deploy at friends/family when they need to share a connection with multiple computers.

I had an old Linksys 802.11b access point whose wireless didn't work. I opened it up, removed the handy WiFi PCMCIA card, and use it as a router. Removing the non-working WiFi card reduced power usage by about one watt.

Re:If it has a router, disable wireless

[jameskojiro]

could you have loaded it new firmware and put in a 802.11g PCMCIA card into it and have a nice shiny new Router?

Re:If it has a router, disable wireless

[noidentity]

Interesting idea. It's a Linksys BEFW11S4 with firmware 1.44.2z, Dec 13 2002. I didn't see any OpenWrt for it. I've been using it as a router, saving my spare WRT54G units for when I need wireless or OpenWrt, which I have loaded on them.

Open, anonymous access point with TOR

[xororand]

You could use one of the old wireless routers to provide free & anonymous Internet access to others by routing all the traffic through TOR.

1. Disable any encryption & access restriction like MAC filters
2. Plug it into a separate ethernet port of a server / machine that's running 24/7
3. Route all the traffic through TOR
4. Throttle its traffic (QOS)

When your neighbor's Internet breaks down some day, they will be thankful for the free, albeit slow, Access Point of yours. Thanks to TOR, you don't have to fear any consequences for any mischief that's conducted over your AP.

Re:Open, anonymous access point with TOR

[mikael_j]

That's a pretty bad idea, while using an unencrypted AP does expose you neighbors to possible sniffing by others in the general vicinity the use of Tor pretty much guarantees someone is sniffing their traffic.

Re:Open, anonymous access point with TOR

[xororand]

As I said... it's an anonymous access point. Of course you need to use proper encryption whenever you're using unsecure links, such as an open access point.

Addition

[xororand]

Here's an example setup: https://www.agol.dk/elgaard/torap/.

Re:Addition

[b0bby]

That's a really cool idea, thanks. Now I know what to do with my extra WRT54GL...

Freecycle

[WillyWanker]

Freecycle them or put them on Craigslist in the free section. Someone will come get em.

Blend it

[El_Muerte_TDS]

n/t

Donate to a hackerspace

[Anonymous Coward]

Donate it to your local hackerspace. Someone may use it to do a cool project that doesn't need WPA1/2 security.

http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_Hacker_Spaces

-Anonymous Coward from HacDC

Donate it to Russian Spies

[abarrow]

It sounds like they could use some upgraded equipment.

How much security do you need?

[damn_registrars]

I would expect if you really thought it over you could come up with some uses for that hardware that don't require the latest, greatest, sexyest security. For example, you could probably build a lower-power print server using the 802.11b stuff; do you really need the best possible security for a print server?

Another possibility is to ask around and see if you can find someone who lives in a less-densely-populated area that could safely use less secure hardware. You might know someone who lives in the boonies, far from a road, who would appreciate a free network upgrade for whatever internet access they have (or don't have).

Or you could just put the whole lot up on ebay. I'm sure whats-her-name would appreciate the campaign contribution...

I'll see your B and give you an A

[RobertB-DC]

The submitter doesn't know what to do with his 802.11b networking equipment, and says it's outdated? What the hell should I do, then, with my closet full of 802.11a adapters?

Seriously -- I got some Intel equipment for $5 a piece, originally $300+, and used it to build my first wireless network. It was a real Frankenstein's Monster of a setup, too: a dialup connection, a Coyote Linux box, and this crazy grey box that was so inefficient, it had a cooling fan built in. The thing didn't even have any sort of basic wired router/switch capability. It sat on top of the fridge for a couple of years... until we went to move it and saw that the warmth had turned it into a magnet for roaches. You've heard of a Roach Motel? This was a high-rise Roach Health Spa. That particular 802.11a adapter went straight into the burn bin (plastic and all).

Sadly, though, I still had three more units. At $5 each, I'd bought four.

To answer my own question, though, of what to do with them... I dropped them off before business hours at a local PC repair shop last week, along with a half-dozen old PCs that the kids were tired of tripping over. I hope they'll be able to put them to good use. After all, who's going to be able to eavesdrop on an 802.11a wireless connection?

Re:I'll see your B and give you an A

[Anonymous Coward]

> The submitter doesn't know what to do with his 802.11b networking equipment, and says it's outdated? What the hell should I do, then, with my closet full of 802.11a adapters?

802.11a is significantly more useful than 802.11b is by merit of being on 5GhZ.

Re:I'll see your B and give you an A

[socz]

I approve of your approach to hardware!

Recently, I tried to go the 'environmentally friendly' route and consolidated all my bsd needs into one dual core atom system. Surprisingly (at least to me!), is that it takes up no more than 30 watts! My monitor (LCD) takes up more than that!

I mention it because of the heat/inefficiency/cooling fan line of yours. It is easy to run 2 or even 3 machines when they're off and on again. But when you start running those or more 24/7, the electric bill adds up.

Re:I'll see your B and give you an A

[jmitchel!jmitchel.co]

Actually 'a' is kinda handy, since it runs in the 5ghz band, which isn't quite as viciously congested. There's a fair bit of 'a' compatible equipment out there.

Re:I'll see your B and give you an A

[isj]

Amen to that.

I recently switched from 2.4GHz (802.11b/802.11g) to 5GHz (802.11a) for the same reason. Where I live I can see approximately 23 networks using 2.4GHz, and the real speed I get out of the 2.4GHz band is *maybe* 6Mbit/s. Full signal strength, but there is so much congestion in the band that the actual throughput is pathetic.

After I switched to 5GHz I get roughly 25Mbit/s consistently.

I didn't try 802.11n because my laptop + mac mini does not support that, and if the 2.4GHz band is that congested then it is not very likely that a more greedy approach to using the 2.4GHz band would have helped.

Re:I'll see your B and give you an A

[Anonymous Coward]

I dropped them off before business hours at a local PC repair shop last week, along with a half-dozen old PCs that the kids were tired of tripping over. I hope they'll be able to put them to good use.

Yeah, I'm sure they will enjoy spending their time and money driving that crap to the dump. Don't worry, they're good for it, small businesses are overflowing with cash these days.

Re:I'll see your B and give you an A

[Anonymous Coward]

Roaches accumulate on top of your fridge, kids trip over old PCs, "burn bin", holy shit, there is more than your wireless standard that needs improvement at your house.

Re:I'll see your B and give you an A

[Anonymous Coward]

clueless post - how on earth does it score 3 points with tag "interesting", no idea. have you ever read what is 802.11a about? it's 5Ghz, OFDM, with rates up to 108Mbps (~50Mbps real tcp/ip throughput)! compare now that to .11b, which is CCK with max rate 11Mbps (5Mbps real throughput). Man, I really hate this "the higher the letter/number, the better it is" logic.

Re:I'll see your B and give you an A

[Anonymous Coward]

802.11n can run on 5GHz, not all 802.11n equipment supports it though.

craigslist

[Brandonski]

Take a picture of the lot of it in one big messy pile. Put it on CL for $20. There's bound to be some geek who's mom raised the rent on his basement "command center" the same day he spilled a can of Jolt on his draft-n router.

Municipal Free Wireless

[Anonymous Coward]

Donate it to http://www.austinwirelesscity.org/ or similar in your area. It makes the telecoms mad....

Donate them....

[Anonymous Coward]

You could donate them to someone putting systems in in a third world country.

For example : I am going to Uganda next year to install a bunch of computers and put SOAS (OLPC OS) on them. I could use the equipment to network some of the systems together.

If you want to donate them I can get you a tax write-off through the organization I am going with.

marckarasek at gmail dot com

Marc

Or Africa

[Tekfactory]

If you read any of the UK tech websites, a lot of landfill bound computers get shipped to Africa as "donated" computers, the companies doing the dumping get HUGE tax breaks, and the country where these are dumped get Heavy Metals in their water table.

A quick google search says this is happening in Nigeria and Nairobi

http://makeitfair.org/the-facts/news/news-item-1

What should I do with my old 802.11 cards?

[EMR]

Yeah that's right.. No bloody A, B, G, or N. the RAW real original 2MB cards. I actually got them for free as we asked the company that made them for some "samples" so we could do testing on them.. And they sent us 5 with 2 PCMCIA "ISA" cards :) But that was so 1998.

Re:What should I do with my old 802.11 cards?

[keeboo]

No bloody A, B, G, or N.

Please don't tell me the card model number was 1701.

Create a public access point

[acedotcom]

I agree with an earlier comment about putting dd-wrt on it if you can. but also put it on your new router too. Then setup QoS, connect your routers together and let people outside of your network have a sandbox with free internet. just set the QoS super low (like 100kbps down and 10kbps up) so it doesnt affect your day to day use. your neighbors will appreciate it and your router will like not being thrown away

Fatal flaw

[Itninja]

I thought B was found to have a 'unfixable' security flaw years ago?

Give them to all your neighbors!

[Anonymous Coward]

Give them to all your neighbors for free wifi going forward. Tell them to be certain to use WEP encryption for security.

Give it to Goodwill

[gafisher]

Your local Goodwill will take it, clean it up and either find a good home for it or dispose of it responsibly. They might even come and pick it up if you've got enough stuff, and in the process you'll be helping the folks who Goodwill helps. I'd call it a Win-Win-Win if it didn't annoy the Mac users.

Maybe not

[BenEnglishAtHome]

If you do that at my workplace, a couple of very serious men with badges, guns, and a laptop running Red Hat will momentarily be walking around your work area. They'll find it in short order. I'd rather not throw away my career, thank you.

Re:Maybe not

[IndustrialComplex]

If you do that at my workplace, a couple of very serious men with badges, guns, and a laptop running Red Hat will momentarily be walking around your work area. They'll find it in short order. I'd rather not throw away my career, thank you.

So hide it under somebody else's desk.

Re:Maybe not

[isj]

Obviously your boss' desk.

Re:Maybe not

[Anonymous Coward]

George Hamilton's.

Nintendo DS.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Nintendo DS can only use 802.11b.
So if you want to set up a hotspot for those, you can!

WWGBSDD?

[socz]

Normally, as not only a member but the founder of GhettoBSD, I would say to keep it and stick it in a future box you might happen to obtain. But being how times have changed, it might not be such a great idea to continue using it as it will hold back the speed of access for whatever ends up using it.

But what would be GhettoBSD Approved! Is that you build a little set up and donate it to a school. Yeah, they probably have things 4x better than what you could provide, but they could give it away to a child in need.

Recently I pruned my collection and was at a loss as to what to do. I really couldn't give away 850 Mhz amd's I used as my servers, because most people just couldn't find them useful. Contacting 'local' recycling centers returned pretty expensive fees to take the components for recycling. Sticking them in the trash was really not an option I wanted to contemplate. So I ended up parting them them out. Hopefully they made someone happy!

Depending where you live and your city, you might be lucky enough to have a local government that promotes recycling. Try that avenue! If not, maybe a local recycling center will take it for free. But the worst thing would be to just toss them in the trash.


BTW, if you have any good junk you don't want, let me know... lol

Hardware recycling

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Ask first. There's a place where I live that explains where they ship things. They charge more.

Server

[erat123]

I have a lot of old routers, some even with a USB connection for external storage devices. I would like to find a way to use something like dd-wrt and make my old routers that I'm not using into a file/web/whatever server, using a USB external drive as storage. That would produce a low power alternative to running a computer. Any thoughts on this?

The classic answer:

[Locke2005]

Doorstops.

Re:The classic answer:

[d-ude]

Boatanchors.

Instant WiFi Rick Roll

[Anonymous Coward]

Make all DNS requests route to the same page... for all your passer-bys. Name it "Free Public WIFI" to match the drive-by scammers so they block the name and you're doing them a public service!

Two words:

[Locke2005]

Free Geek

Guest Wireless

[billstewart]

It won't cause significant interference if nobody's on it very often, or if you live somewhere that the airwaves aren't overcrowded.
Either run it unencrypted, or use encryption but set the SSID to "Password = guest" and be nice to the people who can't just log in to "linksys" any more.

It's your backup, now

[whit3]

There's three things you can do: you can donate/sell/discard the
item, you can keep it against future need, you can offer it
to friends/neighbors etc.

The donate/sell path is useful to the next owner (don't knock
WEP, for a lot of folk it's quite sufficient), provided he/she
can figure out the configuration procedure. Scribble the
configuration address on the case, and fasten the AC adapter
securely to the router, if you go this path.

Keeping it, you can turn off the transmitter and DHCP functions
and it's a switch (and if your wilderness cabin needs connectivity,
it can come out of mothballs with a simple push of the RESET
button to be a full router). In case your 802.11N goes down,
configuring it to only talk to your three MAC addresses gives you
a backup router that isn't likely to be hacked into.

I'd keep it, myself. All the 'extra' functions of newer
items are minor frippery compared with the core value, fast-enough
wireless connection.

am i the only one..

[Anonymous Coward]

that still uses a linksys b router in my home with a friends cell number as the 10 digit passcode?

Tons of uses

[CAIMLAS]

There are tons of uses; if you can't think of them, then

You can set up a wireless bridge between two distant points. See if you can't get ahold of some old Dish Networks reciever dishes.

And, significantly: freecycle them/give them away. There are a lot of people who use really old stuff and would love free upgrades (you know, manual laborers who are none the less intelligent and enjoy tinkering).

Recycle at Best Buy

[sydbarrett74]

Take the stuff to Best Buy and they'll recycle it in a responsible manner. Landfilling it is unacceptable in this day and age.

You live in a rich area

[zogger]

Stuff with less specs than that, especially laptops, still go for decent folding green around here. You won't find anything like that in dumpsters, you'd have to go way back to like pentium 1 stuff for that. Shoot, I'm still using a sempron at 1.3 gig, although I did bump the ram to 2 gigs. A typical bundle around here for a hundred bucks would be a pentium 4 something or other with half a gig of ram and a 15 inch crt monitor, usually some off lease old business desktop or mini tower. Used laptops of similar vintage are like 200 and up (which does get stupid with *mart lappies going for 350 a lot of times on sale).

And I am still using an old "no wireless" router, still works fine, never even owned any 802.11 gear. Network cables still work.

One of the advantages of living in an old cabin, out in the medium sticks, no one gives crap one if you need to pop a hole in a wall. (Muahahahaha! Just had an idea for some sport! Next time I need another hole in the wall for a cable, instead of a cordless drill, I am going to use my .45 with some hardball..just cuz I can..heheheh)

Do you get on with your neighbours?

[AYeomans]

.. or do they borrow all your wi-fi bandwidth? Simpler than http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html you can run an old 802.11b system throttled down to 1 Mbit/sec on a crowded channel with a duplicate SSID.

WEP is fine

[Gothmolly]

Do you even need WEP? Anything interesting you do online is SSL based anyway, right? Do some simple WEP and MAC address locking and you keep people from stealing your wireless, and be done with it.

Donate

[roc97007]

Find an organization that needs computer equipment. I've donated a lot of working equipment to a local homeschool coop. Other possibilities are: Charter schools, underprivileged/low-income, churches, non-profit organizations.

But please don't waste their time passing off stuff that doesn't work. If it's junk, then junk it. (Or recycle, whatever your location has available.)

In Portland, there's Freegeeks. They'll take pretty much anything that works.

Re:Juice Saving

[Anonymous Coward]

The number of older machines that can save juice is somewhere between zero and none if they're 32-bit or less.

32 bit underclocked/undervolted p3 era server?

Have fun with it

[thunderlive]

In college I used my old wifi router for gaming when not in class or skipping to game. I experiment on it, that what I did to my dlink di-524 rev C 54Mbps turned into a di-624 108Mpbs, has a fan soldered on to it, if you totally destroy it try recycling with company X for a rebate on a new router. Perhaps you can look for DD-WRT firmware for your router and make it more practical? Now I connect my router to a battery and hide it in a park, on top of a hill or other place of interest and war drive around looking for it, in the hope I can figure out a solution to connect me and my buddy via wifi living serveral klicks apart. LOL or give / set it up for that neighbor you don't like, then do your torrenting etc. via them.

Mobile repeater

[by (1706743)]

Hook the router to a lead-acid, put it in repeater mode. This is especially easy if the router wants 12v, as most UPSs (and conventional ICE cars in the U.S., for that matter) use 12v batteries.

This solves the "what to do with old 802.11b equipment?" problem, but introduces the new problem, "what to do with mobile repeaters?" -- I'm sure you can be creative, though =)

Backup Internet links

[chaoskitty]

Since 802.11b can be faster than many Internet connections (at least in the United States), a dedicated network can be used to bridge two or more networks which can use each other in case of an outage. For instance, my work is physically close to my home. Both places are on cable modems, but since throttling happens at the modem, the speed between the two is limited by the uplink rate of each place. By setting up a wireless bridge, I can communicate between the two at about five times the speed (500k/sec as opposed to about 100k/sec) while leaving the Internet feeds usable for other applications.

Also, if the connection goes down on one network, a simple route command on one of the NAT / routing machines makes everything go through the other network's Internet connection.

In the case of high wireless network density (I can see about twenty wireless networks from my work), you can also use 802.11b hardware on channels that aren't commonly used in the US such as 12 and 13 (Europe) or 14 (Japan).

Perhaps it's not ideal, but slow is better than none.

It is really hard to throw stuff away

[Anonymous Coward]

I agonized about tossing my USR Courier. Best modem ever, but I'll never need it again, nor will anyone else.

Re:It is really hard to throw stuff away

[unitron]

I agonized about tossing my USR Courier. Best modem ever, but I'll never need it again, nor will anyone else.

I'm guessing you're not an owner of a Series 1 TiVo and don't know anyone who is.

Lacie Lowry was fired.

[Anonymous Coward]

Lacie Lowry was fired at KGBT on Tuesday, June 29, 2010. Her contract had expired and she did not re-sign a new one. She was basically shown the same disrespect given to Larry James when he got fired.

Re: landfill in China

[Anonymous Coward]

I once went on a sales call to a SoCal recycling business. There was a picture on the wall of a young woman in cap and gown, framed with a news article about how this local girl was attending Harvard Law. It was the proprietor's daughter, and the proprietor proudly explained that the profits from scrap computer/ewaste had enabled her to send her daughter to this topnotch education. BTW, they did their tearup/melting/metals salvage right there on the spot and had been in business for years. So fortunately, not all the recycling companies are scammers.

While slow for networking...

[MJMullinII]

802.11b is still faster than the majority of Internet Services out there.

So, aside from being limited to WEP, it's slow speed moving things from computer to computer in your home/office won't be a factor for the majority of people who use wireless only for Internet Access.

I know that's basically been said time and time again in the above posts, I just wanted to chime in about it's slower speed not being an issue if it's only used for Internet Access.

find someone who has low speed broadband

[paulcone]

and doesn't care too much about security. Me, I'm still using my original AirPort base station, because it's still faster than my 1.5Mbps DSL connection, and I don't copy files around my local house network too much. Also I trust my neighbors so WEP is enough for me.

Play with it, or toss it

[Jim Hall]

Do what I did with my old 802.11b WAP: Unplug the WAN cable, open up the access, mark the network name as "Free Wi-Fi", and leave it plugged in. I was surprised how many people had connected to it after only a few weeks! :-)

Then I gave it away to my father-in-law. His WAP had just died, and he needed another one. I tried to convince him to just buy a new WAP that supported better security and faster speeds, but he didn't want to spend the money. But I did get him to lock it down by client MAC address.

But you mentioned other equipment like cards and adapters. I'd send those to recycling. I just did the same with some 10/100 PCMCIA cards, and some 10/100 ISA boards. I suppose I originally kept them because "someone" might want them "some day". Never happened.

Re:Play with it, or toss it

[drinkypoo]

But you mentioned other equipment like cards and adapters. I'd send those to recycling. I just did the same with some 10/100 PCMCIA cards, and some 10/100 ISA boards. I suppose I originally kept them because "someone" might want them "some day". Never happened.

I STILL have some of this stuff. Difference is, I used to have tons. Now I have ONE ISA SCSI card. One PCI SCSI card. One ISA sound card. One PCI video card. Etc etc. I have a bunch of networking equipment, but it's all small. If it starts to take up much space I'll get rid of it. I buy pretty much every Wireless-G AP I can find under $3 in hopes that it will run DD-WRT. When I get a bunch of Gs I'll drop all my B hardware. When I get better G hardware the crappy old stuff that won't run DD-WRT will go. Etc etc. It's amazing how often some of this kit comes in handy. The problem comes when it starts taking up too much space. I have three 12 gallon bins of cables, and I hit those bins remarkably often.

Storage box

[falken0905]

I take all of my old stuff to work and store it in the large green storage box out back of the building. It's nice because the big green box never gets full and there is always room for more. It does smell kind of bad though and there's the occasional rat to contend with.

How about...

[Anonymous Coward]

Think for yourself instead of looking for people to tell you what to do....

Don't donate.

[duffbeer703]

Old electronics are generally worthless, and nonprofits are ill-equipped to dispose of them properly. Take them to a legit electronics recycler to keep them out of the landfill (best case) or out of some illegal dump in the 3rd world where some poor wretch is smelting plastic to harvest the copper.

Flea Market

[Tetsujin]

If there's an electronics flea market nearby with a not-too-steep fee for sellers, that might be an option. There are people who are interested in having this kind of junk, especially if it's free. That's the best kind of recycling - pass it on to someone who will actually use it.

Alternative art

[Anonymous Coward]

Make a robot-dude or robot-gal from all old stuff. Obviously, it is difficult to re-use such stuff as they are meant to be used, but be creative and you'll be surprised :)

SSL VPN

[jroysdon]

You can create a virtual SSID in an isolated VLAN. Nodes that attach to that SSID would use an SSL VPN to connect to a single dual-homed device providing the SSL VPN connection. No need for WEP/encryption at all if you do that.

If someone is not technical enough to know how to do that, I would not give them WEP-only gear as it is just a setup for trouble.

Do a true recycling.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have two thoughts.

1. Re-purpose them for non critical uses and be not connected to the main network. I.e robotics or machine control projects. or playing battleship on two old computers. You can have a "private" network without being connected to the net.
2. Strip them for reusable electronics.

freecycle or craigslist for free

[Anonymous Coward]

Back when I was in high school I had no money and spent a lot of time trying to get other people's cast-off computer hardware. It may have been old, but to a teenager with no cash an old 386dx to play with or salvage some parts from was an educational and fruitful experience. freecycle and craigslist didn't exist yet then, but if they did I can assure you I would have taken advantage of them, and as someone who now is in a position to give away that same hardware i was once collecting, there are many people in your neighborhood who would love to have your hardware, regardless of age. Stick it on freecycle or craigslist's "for free" section, I guarantee you it'll be gone before the end of the week.

Nintendo DS or other challenged client

[Anonymous Coward]

It may be worthwhile to run a single .b access point alongside your super spiffy .n access point for older clients that don't have g or n capability. That way you're not crippling your primary wireless network.

How about this?...

[CosaNostra Pizza Inc]

Use them as paperweights?

gimme that A

[Anonymous Coward]

I really don't understand the insistence on running 2.4GHz (or even `n' in that band) when there's so much more room in the 5GHz band. If I have a choice I always take a/b/g without caring whether it'll do n too, and lets me avoid the microwaves and all the rest. So yes please, I'd take it.

Non Profits

[raedeon]

Non Profits especially in social services would LOVE you if you donated stuff like that. I know my last job would write a letter of thanks for even a single router (jhsdurham.on.ca - a non profit in Canada)

Still in use

[azadrozny]

I gave my 802.11b router to my in-laws. They have two compters and rarely use them at the same time , only using them to check email and surf the web. Their ISP is a greater bottleneck, with a top speed of 6mbps, than the router.

vpn

[kdayn]

use your old gear only for connectivity, encryption and authorization can be provided by vpn. connect you AP directly to Linux box, set up proper firewall rules to disallow any packets other than necessary for vpn, set up the vpn server and you are good to go with any old equipment.

community spring cleaning and swap

[Anonymous Coward]

Always keep a fully functional reliable hub. You never know when you will need to run wireshark to monitor the traffic on your Ethernet network.

There needs to be a community share/swap area, for stuff that you may buy, don't want to store, you may need to use once in a while in future, but don't want to throw away now and pay for it again when you need it. We have libraries for books.. why not libraries for other stuff too?

- boxes and packaging material
- hardware like nails, screws, tools
- Ethernet hubs, switches, Power supply wall warts, cables,
- extension cords, plant pots, electronic components
- auto parts ....

Out to Pasture

[Anonymous Coward]

Put them on the farm.
Put them on secondary roads.
Connect small, slow, communities.
Set them up along the Grand Canyon.
Or in National Parks. Climbing areas. Trailer parks. Danger zones.
Water and air quality monitoring? Buoys and land stations?
Use them to help monitor wildlife?
To connect acid-rain or lesser metereological stations?
Mount wi-fi remote-controlled hunting perches? :p

Let someone start their 'teching' career

[SHaFT7]

I would say see if anyone around wants to 'get into' computers, teching, and networks. Older hardware like this is a great way to start learning things like MAC addresses, DHCP, Wifi Encryption (albeit older) and the like.

How about ham radio?

[kc7rad]

Some very good suggestions on here, even though I do not agree they should be just pitched in the dumpster. If none of these options suit you, consider finding a local ham radio group or becoming a ham yourself. 802.11b/g falls within one of the frequency bands allocated to ham radio. Operated under that service (ham radio) you can use amplifiers, directional antennas and all sorts of other goodies. From what I read, you can go up to 100W out on a 802.11 b and up to (holy cow) 1500W on 802.11 g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_multimedia_radio

Don't send your junk overseas!

[haplesspuppeteer]

I feel compelled to respond to this, even though it'll never receive the attention of the mods because the story is yesterday's.

I've spent a year working in a rural East African hospital, where I helped them rationalise their IT systems and build a site-wide IP phone network, among other things. One of the biggest problems we faced was well-meaning western donors sending old computers and IT hardware!

  - If the only computers you can buy in an East African capital city have SATA connections, why would we want your old IDE drives?

  - If the wireless networking gear we're using is all working at 802.11g, why would we want your old 802.11b gear?

  - If we can't use the stuff, what do we do with it? Throw it into a hole in the ground, where the heavy metals in the components will leech into the water table? Burn it, polluting the local environment? At least in the US or Europe, it'll be disposed of sensibly.

I know it sounds like a good idea; I know it feels better than putting it in the trash. But often palming off your old gear onto a community in the developing world causes more problems than it solves.

linux dispenser

[Anonymous Coward]

you could turn off the WEP, install some
linux on the machine, then enable and configure:
1) TFTPd
2) DHCPd
3) NFS -or- samba (share your favorite linux distro)
-
now anyone who has a PXE enabled
machine can boot from your WiFi and install
linux ...
oh .. wait