Comment What to do with old unloved hardware (Score 1) 259
Non functional hardware
Inert Motherbard:
Disassemble, retain plates and hardware. Retain power supply, IDE or SCSI HD's, drives, RAM, socketed components and cards. Remove battery from board and dispose of responsibly. Toss Mobo. Reuse or recycle case.
Bad HD (not IDE or SCSI):
If the board does not have an IDE or SCSI HD controller, it's not worth the trouble, see above. If it does, replace the drive and keep going. The platters from the drives make cool windchimes.
Disabled Mobo service:
Can the service be replaced with a card (eg. built in SVGA)? If it can, install a card and disable the service in the BIOS. If not, can it run without the service for a dedicated system? If it can't, toss it as an inert Mobo.
How to use Obsolete equipment
8088 or 8086 (PCs and XTs)are excellent training aids and tech demonstrators to show people how to work on a computer. It's harder than most modern systems, but logical, and if they can grok this, they'll figure out a new one in seconds. These also work well as dumb terminals and the IBM's had BASIC in ROM. They need a PC NOT AT keyboard.
286, V20, and V30 (ATs) can do everything a the XT's above can do, take ISA boards, and they have some of the capabilities of newer units. These have the speed to do basic embedded work running C++. Laptops of this era (eg. Epson Equity LT) are great for robotic projects, running stuff off the parallel and serial ports.
386 or 386sx (no mathco) we can run Linux now, albeit a bit slowly. Their best use is as an embedded router / firewall with a 2.2.x kernel. Other uses include embedded project command and control. This is the machine you want to run a web enabled project. Intel still manufactures this unit for embedded applications. Laptops of this vintage make great telnet consoles and if they have the ports, can handle 10baseT and 56K PCMCIA cards. Let's not talk about packet sniffers and the like, shall we?
486 or 486sx (no mathco) make great development boxes for console apps. The faster ones are good enough to run a basic clean X console (I wouldn't run KDE or Gnome) The DX-5 133 and AMD's 586-133 run as fast or faster than a P90 for most apps. On a network they have the horsepower to run as a backup server, router-switch (up to 100baseT), DNS Server, or basic snooper / logger (what, you thought Carnivore was a new thing?). 486 Laptops can do a lot and these are the first to have really good color LCD screens. Using one will frustrate you if you forget it's limitations, and you will, because for some things it runs and looks like a modern PC. The ones with CD and sound make great portable MP3 players for the car.
Any Pentium system has a use. Now we are talking about any small office network slot as a server or high throughput firewall or webserver. Linux at the desktop (you heard me right) or anything else you can conceive of. Anyone who tosses a working Pentium laptop is stupid and deserves to lose a hard working piece of hardware to folks like me. Broken screen? No big deal, use it with a monitor as a workstation or server with a built in UPS.
Any business tossing PII's or better needs to go dot com themselves, but, I'll gladly take donations!
Hope this gives you some ideas of what to do with an old PC or who to give it to.
Quit wasting money folks, what are we doing today that is significantly different from 10 years ago? The Net? Yes, but email and Web don't take that much, and we still type letters and do spreadsheets. Glutted software (I didn't even mention M$) drives the hardware market and the rich get richer. Not on my pocketbook! I have spent less than $1000.- in the last 10 years on PC's and while I've never been on the bleeding edge, those that are have been jealous of my uptimes.
