What do you do with your old hardware?

I resell my old hardware.

valtonray said:

there is always craigslist classifieds: jobs, housing, personals, for sale, services, community, events, forums if you list it as free for pick up it will probably go very quickly. also local schools or universities will often accept donations or direct you to a source that does, as a benefit donating to a school is tax deductible.

In my neighborhood, getting rid of things is as simple as putting it in front of your house by the street. Give it two or three hours and someone has stopped by and grabbed it.

I rarely do extensive upgrades to any old PC's...rather I usually just buy all new parts and put together a new box. Once I'm done with that, I usually just shuffle around the older boxes to upgrade my Linux workstation, my server box, etc. I usually will keep the older boxes for a few years and they just sit around for a spare in the event that I ever want to test anything (but with Virtual machine technology, it's rare that I ever want to use physical hardware).

On occasion, I have sold a part here or there at work to a friend..but not for a large sum of cash. The rest of the time, I take it to the nearest recycling station where they take it off my hands. I honestly don't think attempting to sell the parts on eBay would garner enough profits to cover shipping expenses and the hassle of packaging everything up.

I also have the neighborhood situation where you can just put something out on the curb and within an hour or two somebody stops by and takes it. Not sure what they do with any of this stuff...but I don't care either.

I build spare PC's for the local school's, for friends, family, little old ladies, whom-ever wants them. My wife is happy to just get rid of the hoards of computer junk that I have lying about (although it multiplies like gremlins).

Dead hard Drives with personal data get opened and the platters removed . Another colleague in the industry uses old hard drives for target practice.... it's surprising how many 9mm's it takes to make decent mess of your HD (more than I expected).

Shoot.....it.....

I always keep my old stuff... I currently have :
- An Intel mobo with an already mounted P4 (LGA775) and fan
- 2GB of 566MHz DDR2.
- An ATI Radeon X600 Pro by Sapphire (256MB)
- an LG CD/DVD drive (burns too)
- Multiple extensions lying around
- Mice...
- etc, etc

It's nice to have those... because if I have to do somebody's computer, if he only brings his/her tower, I have everything already to plug it up ^_^