Perfectly OK old PCs

[TopCat]

We have just replaced 3 office desktops with new ones

And I was hoping to recycle or give the old ones away to a charity - since they are only 3 years old and all work- (With XP)

But this is proving so difficult!

I cannot bear this throwaway culture in which I am told I must remove the hard drives smash them with a lump hammer and throw away the PCs!

Am I just a dinosaur in not wanting to fill landfill with various precious and nasty metals (Cadmium anyone) and PCBs that lie in the message boards of the Pcs?

from a grumpy recycling mad E21 owner!

[nas80]

Windows xp is no longer supported by Microsoft.


Go past a charity shop and ask them if they want them?

[Jeroen]

XP may be the cause, but how horrible can it be to obtain a couple of perfectly good PC's at the rate of one Win7/8 upgrade package? Heard something similar here as well. What's behind this?

You are right, this is rapidly becoming more and more of a throwaway culture which doesn't help our economy or environment imho.

And while in the meantime over here our Government throws old pc's in the streets, including intact and unprotected legal, police or criminality files. Not a problem. But your pc at a school, there's a huge risk of terrorism or theft of intellectual property sir!

[TopCat]

Problem solved!

I have a chum (with a Pontiac) who is going to pop in and "nuke and boot" the harddrives with some mega US Military software to clean them and will then take them away to give away or sell or keep as spares

our own IT people were all for wiping the drives @3 hours per pc @my expense!

my chum has nuked 2 of my old laptops and reinstalled the windows for my children- worked well!

love it when a plan comes together!

[Jeroen]

what happened to format c:

[uwbuurman]

Not sufficiënt enough to delete porn...

[Jeroen]

Good to know haha! But there's already ages old software that prevents un-format actions. Works everywhere except for government hardware, guess there's a porn & rubbish overload on those pc's.

[uwbuurman]

Well, they can't look out of the window all day long....

[Jason_323i]

ops

[nas80]

wrong thread Jason lol. is the heat getting to you?!

[uwbuurman]

Well, he's in Dubai, so are a lot of my coworkers, and they tell me its damn hot over there. That must be it, because you don't wanneer be found druk over there

[Jason_323i]

Well i had to many threads open on the phone as for Dubai and drunk it is the expat's No 1 Hobby. The key is not being drunk in public and acting like an ass, a skill set many UK holiday makers seem to lack. As for hot it's cooled down a bit to the low 40's was touching 50 a month ago, still no good when you spend 2 hours outside checking a site in Ramadan with no water.

Back to the original topic, we have the same issue at work we pay to have pc's taken away after being wiped by the IT bods, they can not be given to staff. But i do have one one long term loan wiped it installed linux and use xbmc to have media system setup to my 5.1 system about the only use i could find for it.

[nas80]

I work in IT and a few years ago at a previous employment my manager subcontracted a firm he found in the yellow pages to clean / remove tags / dispose of old IT equipment, some time passed and then we got a call that the police were coming to the office.

Turns out the contractor took the pc's and fly tipped them, any subsequent attempts to contact were list they had disappeared! company got a big fine.