Disposing of old electronics

I'm paring down some clutter. I've got three old PC's that are just sitting around collecting dust. Each has been used for gaming at some point in history, but the newest one is at least 7 years old, and none were top of the line when I got them. They were built around a philosophy of taking good cast-off equipment that just needed a fresh OS install, adding a video card, more RAM, and a power supply, and having a solid gaming rig for <$200.

Probably going to consolidate into one machine mostly for like multimedia and file backup. Then I'll dispose of the pieces I don't want.

Any suggestions on the best way to dispose of these old electronics? I do want to minimize the possibility of people getting personal information.

Two have meh cases. One has a nice case. The newest equipment is in one of the 'meh' cases. They have assorted sized hard drives (the largest is about 240gig and the smallest maybe 30gig). All have video cards of varying power. They all have a DVD rom and a separate CD-RW drive. The two lesser machines both only have IDE cables.

Also have three old hard drives just sitting around, no idea what's on them. All three are IDE. One of them is a 750gig Seagate Barracude though.

In reply to Beer Baron:

Zero the drives with one of a number of utilities, pull hard drives, drill holes in the plates, then smash (8lbs sledge works pretty well), recycle what's left. If the machines won't boot you can use a cable like so to do it with a working machine.

The contractor I used to work for had a fancy shredding machine for HDDs sadly I don't have access to that anymore. I believe the IT guys had to zero the drives 7 times before we shredded them at that job.

The rest you should be able to just take to somewhere than handles e-waste almost everywhere asks for a disposal fee now though.

Take a hammer to the hard drives and break them up. Then take the actual disks and cut/bend them until there is no way they can be used to get anything from.

One will not boot. The other two will. One of those that will, I'm just going to leave as-is and continue to use.

For recycling drives, can I just throw the components in the streetside recycle bin? Or do I need to take them to a special shop? Same with some old rechargeable batteries.

A lot of metal recyclers will give you money for old computers. They can take the precious metals out of the boards and components. For the drives, what people above said will work just fine. Destroy the platters and recycle the rest.

Have you tried searching for e-waste recycling centers around you? I'm lucky enough to live within a mile of a strip mall that does free recycling every few months, so it's easy for me.

I definitely agree on destroying HDs before turning them in though. They supposedly wipe all drives when recycling, but if you have personal data it's not worth the risk. Your E36 M3 might end up on Wikileaks before you know it

The computers have been on the internet, correct? Then everything in the hard drives is already loose and in the wild.

Open them up if you want, there are great magnets in there. If it will make you feel better, destroy the platters, but it really doesn't make a difference.

If you look around, there are computer recyclers that will break everything down for the gold in the chips.

If you have the spare time, you can do the same thing with bleach and muriatic acid, then have garbage circuit boards and good gold left over.

Our local recycling center takes electronic equipment.

If the drives will mount, DBAN or any other file utility to destroy the data (zero or random number sweep, bonus points for multiple rounds if you have time). Even if someone scavenged for your hard drives, they won't bother to try and recover your data if it's properly nuked. I generally keep DBAN on a floppy or USB drive: it's called Boot and Nuke for a reason!

If you drill one hole through the platters (it should be obvious where the platters are from outside the drive, and just go all the way through the drive) there's no way data is being pulled off them. We're not talking about military grade secrets here, after all. So there's no need for dban or sledgehammers. One hole per drive, done. If you want to leave the drives usable, just running dban is enough - it's a "dod" wipe after all. Again, unless you've got some seriously sensitive stuff on there, nobody's recovering data from it after a dban wipe.

After doing that, you can take it all to Ohio Drop-Off, at 533 N Nelson Rd. You can drop it in their bin out front for the quick but $0 option or take it inside to the counter and they'll weigh it and pay you for it. Pulling the boards and separating all the components nets the most money, handing them complete computers nets the least but is the fastest. With three complete computers you're probably in the $9 - $20 range total depending on how much they weigh and how you give it to them.

http://ohiodropoff.com/

I could use a few drives in the 250gig+ range. If you have extra usable drives and are comfortable with me using them I'd give you a few dollars. I can take care of wiping them, and then I'll be putting them in systems I've refurbished to sell.

dculberson wrote: I could use a few drives in the 250gig+ range. If you have extra usable drives and are comfortable with me using them I'd give you a few dollars. I can take care of wiping them, and then I'll be putting them in systems I've refurbished to sell.

Let me see what I end up using or not. I may have either a 500gig SATA or a 750gig IDE drive that I don't end up using.

I do have a 200gig IDE drive that I know I'm not going to use. I don't know if that's too small for you. I also have two 80's and two 40's.

Goodwill does free electronics recycling.

There's actually a market for older gaming hardware, as (surprise!) some people are a few years behind the curve or like playing "retro" games. Anything Win98-era is now sale-able to the right person. Fast P3s or Athlons with ISA slots are worth bank; even P4s or early Core2 systems can usually find takers despite being at the bottom of their depreciation curve. Even if you just put it on CL for free you'll be making someone a lot happier than the recycling facility.

You don't need to destroy the hard drives, just zero-fill them & reformat. No random bozo on Craigslist is going to use forensic-grade data recovery on the off chance they might "get" something on you; 99% of people out there barely even know how a file system works. There aren't roving bands of super-hackers going around harvesting your browser history off old drives. (There are far easier ways to steal your identity than that.)

The wanton destruction of older hardware is a huge pet peeve of mine, why not keep it out of the landfill and let it go to someone who will use it? Maybe making a few bucks in the process?

I don't know how old these are but some ISA sound cards & early 3D graphics cards are worth serious money. 3DFX Voodoo cards alone go for $30-$100+ all day long depending on model. TL;DR check the value of your E36 M3 before you dump/recycle it.

I think best buy still takes electronics scrap, just no CRTs, you pretty much have to dumpster those now.

Goodwill will also take electronics and either resell them or electronically scrap/recycle them.

Destroy the hard drives yourself (unless you know there's no data you care about on them).

Take the tax write-off for next year and help to declutter your life.

Jay wrote: There's actually a market for older gaming hardware, as (surprise!) some people are a few years behind the curve or like playing "retro" games. Anything Win98-era is now sale-able to the right person. Fast P3s or Athlons with ISA slots are worth bank; even P4s or early Core2 systems can usually find takers despite being at the bottom of their depreciation curve. Even if you just put it on CL for free you'll be making someone a lot happier than the recycling facility.

How old qualifies as "retro" these days? I think the oldest machine was set up to be running like Half-Life 2. I know the video card is in an AGP slot, but I forget exactly what the model was and am not seeing conspicuous markings on it.

They older two are running Win2000.

RevRico wrote: The computers have been on the internet, correct? Then everything in the hard drives is already loose and in the wild.

Wow, someone's got a bleak view of computer security.

I took my old box to Goodwill after pulling the drives.

Beer Baron wrote:

dculberson wrote: I could use a few drives in the 250gig+ range. If you have extra usable drives and are comfortable with me using them I'd give you a few dollars. I can take care of wiping them, and then I'll be putting them in systems I've refurbished to sell.

Let me see what I end up using or not. I may have either a 500gig SATA or a 750gig IDE drive that I don't end up using. I do have a 200gig IDE drive that I know I'm not going to use. I don't know if that's too small for you. I also have two 80's and two 40's.

I'd take the 200gb in with any others. When you're ready, email me (my user name here @ gmail.com) if you think of it.

Beer Baron wrote: How old qualifies as "retro" these days? I think the oldest machine was set up to be running like Half-Life 2. I know the video card is in an AGP slot, but I forget exactly what the model was and am not seeing conspicuous markings on it. They older two are running Win2000.

Unfortuntely that's a tough era to price, the top range stuff is worth something, but the mid-to-low end really isn't. All depends on the hardware. A working 1GHz P3 board is worth far more than a 2GHz P4. I just sold someone a bare socket A motherboard from around that time for $30 but it was NIB & had an ISA slot.

If you feel like digging into the systems, post up more details of what the hardware is & I'll try to tell you if there's any market. I've been putting together Win98 "retro gaming machines" in my spare time and have made a bit of side cash selling them, but I got most of the components in lots for free (and they're older than what you seem to have.)

NGTD wrote: Apply power to drive, take a ball peen hammer to the hard drives and break them up.

Fixed that for you. It's fun to stove the cover into the platter at 5400 or 7200 RPM and/or hear the bearings die a terrible death. IBM/Hitachi DeathStar (DeskStar) drives have glass platters. Instant maraca.

In reply to Jay:

Edit: Mobo is an ABIT SG-72 with a 2.40GHz P4.

I'm still trying to figure out what the graphics card is.

I'm pretty sure the Mobo and processor came out of like a consumer grade Dell or something.

Super-Edit: The oldest machine with this hardware is also the one with the nice custom case. I was stylin' with this thing at LAN parties in the early-aughts.

Jay wrote: The wanton destruction of older hardware is a huge pet peeve of mine, why not keep it out of the landfill and let it go to someone who will use it? Maybe making a few bucks in the process?

There were literally hundreds of millions of these machines made. 99.999% of them will be recycled and that's their best use. .001% can be collected and treasured, but there's just not enough of a market for the rest. I recycled hundreds - potentially thousands - of IBM PC's (original, 5-slot PCs with a cassette port even!) back in the early 90s. They're worth hundreds each now! BUT, if people had not recycled so many of them, they would still be worthless.

"You can't save them all" is even more true in the case of old commodity computer hardware. There's so much more of it out there than the market would ever bear.

I find it hard to believe there'd be much market for "retro" gaming rigs to play late 90's/early 00's games. I can still play those on my modern rig running Windows 10. I've got Fallout installed and just found a source for old Ultima games.