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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.
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?
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.
Free Geek
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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)...