Old Computers whats your take

Rob Keeble

Member
Messages
12,633
Location
GTA Ontario Canada
After seeing what my Dad has gone through with holding on to things till you get too old to use them, i have been in anti hording mode for a month now. Yeah you need to wind yourself up to let go of certain things if you are a junk collector.

So I am about to take 4 old working computer chassis to the electronic waste recycling dump. :(:(:( Breaking my heart to do this but i see no other way.

I had planned on using one or two of the more recent versions but with the effort involved given the cost of basic new chassis today i just dont see the value anymore given time is at a premium.

One of them i was going to use to load Ubuntu on and run weather station info collection on and at the same time learn the whole Ubuntu thing. But time is the issue so its been on the backburner of someday when this has been done or that has been done etc. This is exactly what happened to my Dad. He is 93 and he even settled for a new computer just the other day.

So whats your take on these things. I been thinking of all the parts and maybe stripping out a couple of spares like power supplies. But really i dunno. The supplies in these things can be used for a electolysis bath given their high dc current rating but for my needs well Evapo rust does it for me.

Any thoughts. I simply struggle to throw working stuff away but in this part of the world even the underpriveledged get new stuff and the way the web is its pointless trying to take advantage of new tech on the old tech just drives you crazy.

My one concern is legacy software where there is not wide use and the "techies" involved have no justification to upgrade to the latest operating system. This is where my weather data concerns lie.

So i would be interested in your thoughts and suggestions

Thanks
 
I've got the exact same problem and have shelves of stuff that I 'might' use.

If you are in the mood I say dump it.

If you really want to put your weather station on the web, then maybe keep the best of the bunch for that.
 
Rob, installing Ubuntu is a great way of prolonging a computer's life. Just last week I installed version 10.04 on one of my old laptops. It seems to be rock solid and works pretty fast. Some people even compare it with Windows 7. I am still learning the OS but it is very intuitive and user-friendly. On the other hand, availability of softwares for Ubuntu is whole different issue.
 
I'm in the computer industry (30+ years) and I throw lots of good stuff out every month. I'm responsible for over 300 computers and 100 servers at my location and we cycle them every 4 years no matter how good they are.

My suggestion is to take the hard drive out of any computer you're about to recycle. If you have an arbor press - use it and smash the drive flat. If not, drill a hole through it or run over it with your car/truck. In other words destroy it before recycling it.

I'm a little paranoid about data getting out so every drive we recycle is put in an arbor press and smashed before leaving. Helps me sleep at night.
 
I'm in the computer industry (30+ years) and I throw lots of good stuff out every month. I'm responsible for over 300 computers and 100 servers at my location and we cycle them every 4 years no matter how good they are.

My suggestion is to take the hard drive out of any computer you're about to recycle. If you have an arbor press - use it and smash the drive flat. If not, drill a hole through it or run over it with your car/truck. In other words destroy it before recycling it.

I'm a little paranoid about data getting out so every drive we recycle is put in an arbor press and smashed before leaving. Helps me sleep at night.


Ciao Antonio.....And what he said about the hard drive is 100% on the money....take it out and smash it with a sledgehammer...(then do some satanic chants around it:D)....the info someone can pull off of an old hard drive would surprise and scare you. Computer forensics is a huge field. Data can be pulled off....credit card numbers...etc....with a readily available program.
 
Out here in Nevada we have some pretty creative ways of destroying hard drives....

Think "High speed hole punchers" :D
 
My weather machine is a little low powered mini-itx box. It runs ubuntu off of a hard drive attached via usb.

Just checked and the uptime now is 34 days. The only reason the uptime is so low is we had a power outage 34 days ago...

It's very stable and reliable.
 
With the recent acquisition of a new laptop for my wife, we now have two old but usable computers taking up space. Like Rob, I hate waste and am reluctant to just toss. When I was President of our computer club we took, literally truck loads of computer hardware to the dump. Must have been 500 of the office type track/sprocket ? drive printers. Folks thought they were doing good to donate them to the school district. Schools found out they couldn't use them and thoughtfully donated to our club. We found them equally useless. Archaeologists will find them one day, a 100 feet underground at the landfill.
The computer club used to recondition computers and donate to worthy causes or people. Nobody wants anything but the latest these days. Can't give away and we don't have a recycle facility locally.
Yep, it's a pity and a waste. :(
 
Ubuntu is a nice OS. I have three pc's up on it at home. Steady and reliable and good updates. I run them on very old Dell pc's. Though work requires me to recycle machines quickly, my home machines I keep until they smoke out.
 
We've got a local non-profit place that recycles old computer parts and sells the more popular items. I've found if I have a project that requires an older computer, I'll just stop and pick one up. Usually end up re-donating it back to them when it's used up. I typically send these back with the hard drive since I don't use them for anything that would be cause for concern. Personal pc's get the hard drive destroyed.

I've found I can run either VMWare or Sun's VirtualBox for any Linux or older Windows software that needs a specific OS, so I don't mess with old hardware much anymore.

VMWare systems also work great for re-trialing software over and over. Just make copy of the system image before installing the software, then when the trial ends, copy off any data files, replace the image with the backup copy and install again. Doesn't work for all trials, but works great for a lot of them.
 
At the university we're filling blue bin after blue bin with old CRT monitors.

Yes they work.

Two years ago we had a lab upgraded and tried to sell off 24 decent CRTs. Even at $5 for two, we sold a grand total of one.

...art
 
Like Antonio, I have been doing this for so long . . . a coworker and I were realizing the other day that neither of us has EVER bought an operating system. I have NEVER bought a new computer; my work has always supplied new ones and let me get not-very-old units for a few bucks. Laptops I have that cannot survive as fully functional PC's end up as Internet radio receivers or get passed down to someone who wants to play solitaire or free cell or who has nothing. There is always the condition of NO SUPPORT offered to anyone I pass a unit down to, I don't have the time or patience ;-)
 
Old computers make great shop computers. I put on W2K, a browser to surf with. Install Winamp and I have good set of speakers with a sub woofer and instant stereo. I don't do much else with them so slow is OK.

Of course I have two dead one down there now. Need to see what happened to them. More than a power supply and will probably recycle them and find another cheap older running machine.
 
Depending on the hardware, a home server might be an option. I have a build from 2004 that's a bit too old to use, but my 2009 build will become a Windows Home Server hopefully at some point next year. And I'll use the opportunity to build a nice Core i7 build once the i7-930 comes under $150 regularly.
 
I've got the same problems, Rob. I've got two computers running in my office, but have two or three older ones in storage, along with three or four 19" CRTs. I keep thinking I'll wake up one of the old ones for various reasons (shop PC, Linux box to learn with, web/e-mail box for my Luddite wife, etc.), but at the end of the day, they're just sitting and costing me space. I considered giving one to my BIL, but I don't want the tech support that'd have to go along with it.

Anybody wanna buy an AMD K6 450 MHz system? I'll even throw in dual monitors. Today only...$14.95. Local pickup only. :rofl:
 
Rob,
I'm not particularly computer literate... I can install and uninstall programs, do a little of the mechanical work like installing hard drives, etc... not much else. My son, who is a manager of a division of an IBM company says that Ubuntu will run along side Windows on most PC's without interferring with the Windows.... I ran it on my Dell that way while I was recovering a crash... if you want to put up your weather station, you might be able to run it on a good PC along side the windows os....
 
I'm almost embarassed to say how many computers I have... But here goes...

1) Personal Computer
2) Weather Computer
3) Work Laptop
4) Music Workstation
5) Media Center
6) Sharons Home Laptop
7) Sharons Work Computer

That seems ridiculous to me...
 
Top