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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."
Simple
Just like any other crap, bundle it all up and put it on ebay. The alternative is landfill.
Those who can, do. Those who cannot, sue.
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.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
If you happen to be in Portland, Freegeek does good things with your old stuff.
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. :)
Reduce -- too late, you presumably already have replacements
Reuse -- Freecycle etc, charities,
Recycle -- last option.
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.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
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).
... 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.
who's moderating the meta-moderators?
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.
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.
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.
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.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Free Geek
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
http://evilscheme.org/defcon/
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)...
Take the stuff to Best Buy and they'll recycle it in a responsible manner. Landfilling it is unacceptable in this day and age.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
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.
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.