Old Computers

Having a clearout of one of those dark and dusty corners, rediscovered a couple of old PC cases with some internals.
Should I Recycle them? if so where?
Or should I just stick them in the skip at work?

Home

Was at an awards ceremony last week and the organiser of this company gave a speechm worth a look and he /they will take anything!

hmmm – what are the parts you can identify?

One appears to be a Pacific PC which I think was a Pentium 2 350 processor and appears to be complete apart from the mains power transformer.

The other is an empty case, but there is also a box of components CD/DVD drives fans etc which I remember dismantling for my own entertainment and education when the Motherboard failed – AS ROCK K7S8XE+(for AMD Processor).

Don’t skip it. The computers contain valuable and rare metals as well as heavy metals which can leach into the ground. Either take it to an electrical shop as they have to offer a recycling service under WEEE regs, or take it to the tip and put it in the small electrcals container.

If you are worried about data then hammer a few holes in the hard drive first.

cheers 6hours – not what i’m after, but yeah, recycle them one way or another 😀

Council skip – it’ll either get stripped for parts or sent to recovery.

Honestly doubt any of that is good for much beyond enthusiast stuff, even then a Pi or such would be much better.

Ebay. It amazes me what tat some folks will buy.

Thanks for all the suggestions and advice, I will look for local recycling availability.

We have an old Mac G4 and a windows laptop gathering dust, I’m not very techy, so what should I do before handing them in to recycling? Is it just a case removing or destroying the hard drive thingy?

Is it a G4 desktop? Which one [post pic] – the machine may sell on ebay, even if only for the case, assuming it’s in good nick.

Yes it’s a desktop, cosmetically reasonably good, thanks I’ll pull out the hard drive and see if it sells.
Cheers.

Is it just a case removing or destroying the hard drive thingy?

Google DBAN.

i remove and stash the hard drive / ssd somewhere safe, regardless.
although on the newest ones with soldered on SSD or royal PITA to open cases, I’d probably do something to fry the SSD.

my stash of HDDs will get raided for neodymium magnets at some point, and the platters put beyond use.

rest of the PC/lappy can then go wherever… freecycle, municipal recycling,…

As an aside,

I can attest that destroying a HDD with a claw hammer in a fit of pique is surprisingly difficult. They’re robust little buggers.

You gert pansy!

Thanks for the advice folks, the drives are out and will be given some FBH.

Meh.

Screwdriver point on HDD case. Rubber mallet impact on screwdriver head == dead HDD

Never seen the point in destroying drives, as Cougar says there’s DBAN which is more than sufficient for home use as no opportunist is going to go to the sort of lengths necessary to recover stuff after that.

Just wasting money IMO, if it works people will buy it.

Screwdriver point on HDD case. Rubber mallet impact on screwdriver head == dead HDD

There’s dead and then there’s dead.

A screwdriver through the case would (probably) prevent your average teenager from just plugging in the drive and reading the data. A lot of that data would survive though, an may be retrievable by specialists. If the data on there is valuable enough for someone to pay OnTrack a grand for (or engage the services of a criminal hacker), then you need to DBAN it / otherwise destroy it properly.

Plus of course, if you’re recycling your PCs by donating them to a charity or someone else who can reuse them, a properly flattened drive can be recommissioned.