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How do I throw out a computer?
Lord Jezo
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I have a dumpster in my place that I use but I don't think I am just supposed to toss a PC into it.
I have two old computers sitting in my closet taking up space and I do not need them. I have stripped from them everything I have wanted and now they are just hulks of metal sitting in my closet. If I can't sell off the remaining components are there PC recycling places I should use or do computer stores take them like auto parts stores take used oil.. ?
I have two old computers sitting in my closet taking up space and I do not need them. I have stripped from them everything I have wanted and now they are just hulks of metal sitting in my closet. If I can't sell off the remaining components are there PC recycling places I should use or do computer stores take them like auto parts stores take used oil.. ?
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Could try to find a place to scrap the tower and toss the smaller components.
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find your city's eco-station or equivalent where they take electronics and that sort of thing for disposal
it would be the "3rd way" next to trash and recycle
Your mileage will likely vary: I've been in some places (like Bloomington, MN) where the city will take computers for no charge, while other places charge $20 or so to take a tower and around $15 for a CRT monitor.
Alternately, if they're namebrand PCs, you can contact the manufacturer; Dell, for instance, will recycle for no cost ANY Dell-branded PC, no matter how old.
Failing that, Goodwill or Salvation Army will probably take them off your hands.
You really shouldn't. Ecological impact aside it is a horrible waste of parts.
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
Burn it.
With fire.
Bonus points for filling it with fireworks first.
....why would you purposely destroy the harddrive, then donate the remains? If you're going to recycle it, fine I guess. But unless the thing had half its components fried, a lot of places could USE these computers. Destroying the hard drive before you donate it is like donating a mattress to a shelter, but requiring them to spend $100 steam-cleaning it first. It's not useful until the places SPENDS money, which makes the donation a lot less useful.
Besides, even if you're got really fucking disgusting shit on your hard drive that should never see the light of day, there are tons of free programs that will erase and overwrite everything, ensuring your data is never seen again. That way the hard drive is still usable by said charity, and your data is safe. But to be honest the average computer user would probably be fine with just a regular-level format.
Yeah, use a program called dban (freeware, government standard for cleaning a drive) and just give it to someone if you really don't want to keep it... or if you want to get rid of it that bad, send it to me and I'll pay shipping.
I mean, if you are going to give it to a friend or something, then yeah, just reformat, but I just wouldn't feel comfortable, but that's just me and I tend to panic about crap. As for my the horrible stuff I have on my harddrive, there actually isn't any... It's all on my flash drive which is always with me. ;-)
Why? Do you keep anything important on it? It's pretty stupid to record SSNs and CC numbers in plaintext and that's pretty much what that guy was looking for. Well, that and bank account passwords no doubt (PayPal, eBay, etc). There are planty of applications that will store them encrypted so that there is no way to just pull them off the drive and it makes more sense to just move on to the next one rather than try to figure out what is in the encrypted mass of bits.
I'm assuming he doesn't want the children at the homeless shelter to find out personal information that they could use in epic fraud.
Or he doesn't want them finding all the porn. That too.
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Somebody already mentioned DBAN
If you DBAN the drive, nobody is getting data off it ever again. All the data will be wiped and random characters written over the entire drive several times over.
And for the love of God, please nobody post that stupid paper about how MAYBE with an electron scanning microscope YOU MIGHT be able to get data off a randomed drive - that shit just ain't realistic for some punk trolling for SSNs.
I can conclusively state that I have never, ever saved a single thing on a HDD that would contribute to identity theft if a thief found it. Not that a browser wouldn't ever have saved a password to a financial resource or something, but those too are supposed to be encrypted. You'd have to be pretty sure that there is something specific you don't want someone to find for that to be a problem.
Of course, there were utilities for viewing the PWL (Password List) of ancient Windows versions, but were we really doing online banking back then?
Best advice: Don't save anything locally. Use an encypted flash drive and then just hope the online resources you use don't leak the data from their end and you shouldn't ever have to worry about destroying a HDD. Even passwords can lead to something you don't want them to have from online resources, so just make a password that you could never forget, "abstractify" it (e.g, replace zeroes in a date with o's), reverse it, and add a modifier for each usage in case it is ever intercepted ("p" for "PayPal"). If you need to rotate it often, base your modifier on the current date. You should never have to write any password down and yet it can be extremely cryptic and unique for each usage.
Yup. Unless you are holding military secrets or something and they know it, it's about a trillion times more profitable to just move on to a drive from someone else who did not use DBAN.
the motherboard and other cards in the computer contain precious metals that will pay you either about that much or something to take all of it from you so they can get the metals out of it, from what ive heard. you should search out a recycling place that is going to pay you to take this stuff, becuase they extract the precious metals like gold etc to sell
You'll need a good accelerant, or it's just unimpressive.
Whatever you do with the computer, my usual advice is not to throw away the hard drive. After spending a month working at a hospital wiping old hard drives to the extent required by HIPAA privacy regulations, I became aware of just how hard it is to actually clean a drive. Granted HIPAA is more stringent than ordinary privacy concerns (up to and including common sense), but when you've DBAN'd or worse a hundred drives and had the inspector send a dozen back with recovered text taped to them, you lose faith in data destruction.
You can zero it a number of times. But I always assume this isn't all that worthwhile...if that worked wouldn't the hospitals and government agencies be doing this instead of creating a more complex directive to confront this problem?
Make sure you have a friend clear the area of bystanders.
Especially if you throw the monitor. When the tube explodes it'll sound like a shotgun and you'll get pieces of glass that fly 3 floors up.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
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Please take your unwanted machine to a recycler that does not export.
Thank you for being responsible.
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Apparently, there's only one place in town that takes batteries.