what companies do with old computers

The company I worked at for 32 years either traded the old computers in when contracting for new ones or sold them at auction. They would buy several hundred at a time. At one time, I was the poor soul who received and checked them in. What a nightmare that was because they would come in daily on pallets over a two week period. I would have to break the pallets down and record the serial numbers, a tedious process because Compaq couldn't be bothered to provide a packing list for each pallet. All I had was a copy of the entire P.O.'s serial number list and the serial numbers on the pallets weren't sequential. Of course, I.T, had the serial numbers preasssigned to their eventual destination. On that particular FUBAR, the old computers were either reassigned to departments with less clout or were sold at auction. Usually, the ones sold at auction were on a lot basis; one couldn't bid on just one computer (and, frankly, I don't why anyone would have wanted to; they were usually pretty tired by then).

Here's an interesting situation. The Mac's at the school are bought with Government grants. Since they were, once they become obsolete/replaced with newer ones, they can not get rid of them, they have to be trashed. My Professor told me that somewhere, in the school, there are about 40 Macs sitting in a room collecting dust. They are only 5 years old & 3 years ago, were worked on by Mac techs to be upgraded. This upgrade was done AFTER the new ones arrived.

However, because of federal law, despite the fact they are no longer used, they can NOT be sold, given away or donated as this would be a violation of the terms under which they received them.

So they sit collecting dust.

We had something of a drawing at work for about two dozen dell's. All the machines with 7 on them were scooped up, a few with vista/xp. The rest went to an e-recycling program, more like a drop off.
Side note the new dell 3010's have i5's & 8 gigs, not bad. Pokie 5400 drives though.

If your lucky and know someone in charge of the upgrading process you can get good stuff for cheap or free

Maybe it has to do with the state I live in within the US but the companies that I have worked for would always scrap the older machines because they had been depreciated over the years for tax purposes so now had a value of $0 and could not be sold or given away.