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Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Over 500 Used DIMMs?
An anonymous reader writes "My company is pursuing a RAM upgrade, resulting in 500+ used DDR3 4GB DIMMs. What could this be used for? Are there any cheap products on the market which can take a huge number of DIMMs? Is there a worthy cause we should donate the gear to?"
I don't know where OP is from, but in BC, Canada, there is a group called Computers For Schools BC, who are in the (government-funded) business of taking old computers and buffing them up for use in the school system. I suspect they would be pleased to receive something as close to current as 4GB DDR3... and they do enough volume that 500 of them would likely be used up in a month.
They'll help your used chips find good homes in school computers and so forth: http://www.cristina.org/aboutus.html
http://www.freegeek.org
I once worked at a nonprofit that redistributed bulk PCs donations from large donors to many small nonprofits. We would get a hundred computers at a time and they almost always 1: had minimal RAM and 2: no hard drives. Any donations of RAM would be appreciated. If you have a similar charity in your area consider old hard drives (that are still working OK) as well.
I work at a school for special-needs teenagers, and we could probably use about 200 of them if they were available.
Donate to http://www.computersforclassrooms.org/
They would end up going to Computers used in classrooms.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
You can always donate them to a local Computers For Kids project.Believe me,any and all kinds of hardware is always needed.I ought to know.I've run such a program for a good 20 years
Geek Hillbilly
Here's a charity local to me that builds PCs for the disadvantaged:
https://sites.google.com/site/carolinafreepc/
Purpose
To provide PCs with educational programs to low income
families and children at no cost.
Goals
To help kids become knowledgeable about computers
To interest kids in engineering and technology
To encourage kids to stay in school and graduate
let the employees take home a few if they have a use for them. Make people happy and it won't cost anything or at least not much depending on what you would otherwise do with them.
Just plain wrong. You can stick ECC RAM into a desktop; the desktop computer will simply ignore the ECC bits, and use the RAM as if it were of the common desktop variety.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Let's not forget the very computers your local school rejected were being disposed of by your employer.
If you take a good look at your local school budget you'll likely see that about 70-75% goes towards teacher salaries and benefits (as it should), and as much as 1-2% goes towards technology per year - I seriously doubt that your district's technology policies are causing the taxes to rise.
Ken
Err, I am afraid sir, that you are incorrect.
Many boards without ECC support will fail to post. If it is also registered memory, EVERY board without ECC support will fail to boot.
And around the Bay we have the Alameda County Computer Resource Center. They build computers to give away to folks in need, to "narrow the digital divide."
.: Semper Absurda