Comments on: A weird, sad feeling

By: eksith

eksith — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 03:36:30 +0000

What a waste!

Older computers make excellent thin client terminals.

I don’t think it’s you putting in your own perspective. I think it’s just them loosing theirs. When someone is so bent on one goal, they fail to see other possibilites.

Classic case of technological short-sightedness.

By: Timmy Macdonald

Timmy Macdonald — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:07:57 +0000

I get angry about computers being thrown out, like everyone here, but I also get mad at the amount of time, effort, money and waste that goes into the Microsoft-created push to replace computers every 3-5 years. Schools are “upgrading” from XP to Vista all over the place, when the only need for extra hardware is to support a needlessly bloated OS. The ideal would be to put Linux on all of them–they’d be fine until all the hardware actually died–but even just common maintenance would help a lot.
–
Although…if everyone hangs on to their computers forever, where does that leave us, the geeks who snap up the “old” computers?

By: dannybuntu

dannybuntu — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 03:30:22 +0000

Well, some people were insightful enough that soem of those machines are being sold here in the Philippines for 5000 pesos. You could literally buy a laptop here that costs $50 to $100 USD. Most of the machines that end up here are PIIIs and PIVs from South Korea. Hehehe, so much for sending the 100$ laptop in third world countries.

There, another free business idea from your truly

By: Schnauzer

Schnauzer — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 03:29:18 +0000

If security is an issue, why not just use DBAN?

By: A.Y. Siu

A.Y. Siu — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 03:13:07 +0000

Well, the three R's are Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (in that order). Unfortunately a lot of people get so fixated on the Recycle part that they forget about Reducing and Reusing. I wouldn't say there's nothing that can be done about it, but doing something can get quite involved. I'm quite impressed with the ACCRC. They will take re-usable computer parts, install Linux on them, and give them to needy individuals, non-profits, or schools. What is unusable, they melt down and recycle.

By: JiGGaK

JiGGaK — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 03:00:43 +0000

Recently I had to decommission 2 dozen or so p3/p4 desktop PC’s used as servers and desktops. The issue of dealing with sensitive data was an easy one. Build a custom Arch live cd with a small bash script that executes on boot:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

All these systems are destine for sale, but most will likely end up in a recycling yard.

Sadly the recycling industry is in a state of flux. With little policing of safe recycling practises, you can expect most of your e-waste to end up in place like China where people will extract the precious metals in a very unhealthy way.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/11/06/60minutes/main4579229.shtml

So far I have had a hard time trying to find a way to filter the responsible recyclers from the irresponsible.

By: Jon

Jon — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 02:59:04 +0000

Free Geek, however is encouraging.

By: Tony

Tony — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 02:33:28 +0000

I agree with you! It sickens me to see useable computers thrown away.

My wife is a school teacher and there is a storage room at her school with discarded desktop computers, CRT monitors, and printers. There are rooms like this in each and every school within this school system. The only problem with ‘most’ of the computers are they are for the most part Pentium 3 models. All run Windows 2000 or XP. The school system has a warehouse full of these discarded computers too. For some reason the school system administrator’s will not auction these computers or even give them away to school children who do not have a computer at home. The reason they say is because private information may be on the hard drive and because of Windows licensing agreement the computer hard drives would have to be erased. I suppose eventually they will be landfill fodder?

My name had been mentioned to be given several of these computers to rework and then give them away to someone in need. I would’ve loaded Linux on the computers and that would’ve taken care of ALL information on the hard drive previously. Needless to say that idea didn’t go very far with the school system.

I applaud people and groups that rework discarded computers, but sometimes it is an uphill struggle to try and do the right thing…