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Hardware

Dell Offers Curbside Computer Recycling 162

Posted by timothy from the new-source-of-ram-and-old-hard-drives dept.
schm00 writes "A Dell press release today announced an expansion of thier recycling program. For $15 they will arrange to pick up used computer equipment from your home and transport it to an EPA approved recycler. You can order pickup starting on March 25th. It's nice to see an alternative to the darker side of computer recycling."
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Dell Offers Curbside Computer Recycling More

Dell Offers Curbside Computer Recycling

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  • Recycling (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Night War ( 544005 ) on Thursday March 20, 2003 @01:54AM (#5552008)
    Neat. But what happens with the recycled stuff? Do they just dump it or do they sell it?

    • Re:Recycling (Score:2, Informative)

      by WegianWarrior ( 649800 )

      I would assume that they strip 'em down for raw materials. There is a company where I live who buy electronic scrap, pick it apart and make a handsome profit by selling the gutted remains (glass, aluminium, gold and so on).


      While I'm not an economist, you may be paying Dell to earn more money...

      • Re:Recycling (Score:3, Insightful)

        by cebe ( 34322 )
        While I'm not an economist, you may be paying Dell to earn more money...

        well, I am, and if that's the case... let them. They should make money.. it gives them an incentive to do this recylcing program, which will somehow or another remove (or at least reduce) the pollution (or Negative Externalities as we like to call them) from the "real cost of computers"

        If we don't find a way to control the MSC (marginal social cost), we'll pay for it. In the price of computers. This is actually a very interesting way

    • Re:Recycling (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It gets shipped to Tawain where there are no environmental laws on burning garbage. It is then melted down for it's metals (gold, silver, aluminum, etc.) and eventually sold back to us.

  • There's nothing like (Score:5, Funny)

    by Gortbusters.org ( 637314 ) on Thursday March 20, 2003 @01:54AM (#5552015) Homepage Journal
    Recycling and hydrogen fuel enhancements to follow the Iraq news.

    Seriously, this is a nice item. I see so many computers go into the dumpster at work, especially when changing offices.

  • huh.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by xao gypsie ( 641755 ) on Thursday March 20, 2003 @01:55AM (#5552019)
    shoot, just tell me where you live, and i would be happy to be the computer scavenger...... and i will even do it for free..

    xao

  • Very interesting. (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    These old computers will became missile controllers and *I have to pay* them for that.
  • They will be glad to pick it up from your home for free with thankful eyes and faces.

    Not trolling, but I don't really think this type of business service worth any mention in slashdot. FYI, I donate all now-useless-for-me computer parts to charity (I live in Hong Kong, though. so YMMV in the states or other nation.)
    • I can't say for anyone else, but in my case by the time I'm done with it charity wouldn't want it.

      They get enough utter trash dumped off on them without throwing them my old MFM hard drives and burned-in VGA monitors.
      • Wrong. Most equipment useless to computer geeks are probably some pentium-iii class equipment and they are actually quite useful as either:
        - machine for the poor students
        - machine for the elderly to learn computer

        They like it quite much.

        FYI, i saw this in slashdot's ad system:

        http://www.giftsforsight.org/?caha

        Remove '?caha' to have non-slashdot affinate, i.e.

        http://www.giftsforsight.org/
        • Pentium-IIIs? Are you _nuts_? I'm still using a P5C-MMX for work :).

          Just because geeks tend to have bad-ass computers doesn't mean they just discard the old ones like used condoms. There are zillions of things you can do with a P-II, let alone a higher-clocked P-III.

          Household servers, for instance - wouldn't mind having something that I could load old hard drives onto and use for network storage. Linux alone makes for all sorts of neat things, like thin client servers.

          When you're talking about geek trash
          • Nope, we're note nuts, but at times, when I do the IT-support job for companies (and for many time, clearence), I buy around 5 from them at about 13 dollar a piece (US Dollars equivalence, 100HKD, 2 years ago, and Pentium III-450).

            Then I used 2 as a mosix cluster and 3 gone to charity. I'm not nuts, but I like being like this.
          • Sorry.. wait.

            Condom?
            What's that?..

            Are you implying that there are some people on /. that have had sex? OH MY GOD! (And that's not a sex sound!)

            But, uhm. Yeah. You can easily turn an old machine in to a router for ICS. Hell, a local internet cafe seems to be using my old 66 mhz pre-pentium computer just fine! All the other computers work just great (and they're p3's with one or two p2s, of course, the customers generally don't know the difference..) Must note that it's an internet cafe, not a gaming cafe.
          • The computer I'm sitting here using is a Dual Athlon, 1GB of ram and more hard disk than you can shake a stick at. What am I doing with it all?

            Browsing the web. I don't need all this power. It only comes in handy when I do something like compile a new kernel.

            Why have I got all this power? Well you've got to put other geeks in their place surely? Or is it just all penis-envy?

            Rus
            • even though i just upgraded, my old p3 700mhz(@805mhz) will run even unreal tournament 2003 quite nicely.

              So many people think that CPU is all that matters. I had a Radeon 7500 in there and it frekin screamed.

              I'll bet atleast 50% of the machines picked up by dell are of this calibur.

              I wish people would pay me to take their old hardware.... oh wait I'm a in home tech, they do. all my machines are peices of old machines. just a little ram and the occasional HDD and it's fine.
          • Want an old 486? Nah, I didn't think so.

            Only 'cause I've got one already - I use it to run older games and such. But my home webserver is a Mac SE/30 running NetBSD; way more than able to saturate a 128Kbps DSL upstream.

            (I need more practice at these penis contests. I don't think you're supposed to brag about how small it is... :-> )

        • You're assuming that everyone who would be intersted in this is a latest-greatest consumer; during the last 9 years I've been using home computers, only one person I have met falls into that category.

          Hell, my brother just traded in a pentium *ONE* he'd been using in for a new dell; I think that is more likely the level of technology that is getting dumped off.

          And regarding how *I* am wrong when I talk about *my* usage of computer hardware...? Cute, that. :p I still have hard drives from 1998; to me, usele
          • No, actually it's much better hardware. After they upgrade the idea of installing a network or using that old monitor is repulsive. I had a friend who worked for the local garbage company, and he would find full working machines (or one witha floppy jammed up) in the trash.
            A little investment of a floppy drive or even nothing at all is all it took to have a good machine ready for ebay. he hated the job, but the extra income from e-bay made him never want to quit.
        • My current PC is a PII 400. It's the second fastest PC in the house. I'd LOVE a PIII :-P.
    • I've recycled dozens of computers for charities, and recently helped a group install Linux on 300 refurbished (Pentium 75+) computers to be sent to Equador.

      You wouldn't believe some of the crap I've had to wade through. Broken monitors, burned motherboards, piles of 8086's.

      Most groups would rather live without a computer then take your old 386 with a green screen monitor. They need a computer that can run modern or semi-modern software, without a techie to help them deal with unfamiliar or primitive UI's.

      For disposal, $15 is a pretty good deal.
      • " I've recycled dozens of computers for charities, and recently helped a group install Linux on 300 refurbished (Pentium 75+) computers to be sent to Equador."

        seems to conflict with

        "They need a computer that can run modern or semi-modern software, without a techie to help them deal with unfamiliar or primitive UI's."

        in my mind.
        • I guess we disagree on what "old" means.

          I don't consider P75's to be very old. You can run Linux + Blackbox + KDE with some defaults turned off. It's slow, but perfectly usable.

          On the other hand, I've seen people try to give away stacks and stacks of old 386's which were rotting in a basement somewhere. Half were broken (everything from cracked motherboard to super dirty or dusty, or electronically damaged chips for whatever reason) beyond repair, and if you did fix them, what useful software could you ru
        • Are you kidding? I have a friend that just put Win2kPro on a P-133. After adding 80Megs of memory, it works just fine. Word and Excel (both part of Office 2k) loaded up faster than on my computer at work (a PIII-800; I must have a bunch of other crap that slows things down). If you're not going to do much more than word processing, e-mail, and web surfing, a pentium is probably totally sufficient. I'd bet the internet connection is going to be more of a bottleneck than the processor.
    • Just go to the adopt-a-geek [kde.org] site! They are screaming for old hardware.
    • They will be glad to pick it up from your home for free with thankful eyes and faces.

      Right. Someone talked Project Gutenberg into accepting a bunch of Pentium Pro 133s. Any one associated with the project can get one for the price of shipping. Last newsletter, the guy was begging for his basement back.

      The first thing any slashdotter is going to do is strip the old computer for stuff that's going in the new computer (video card, hard drive, exotic hardware). Given that, who really needs another junk mach

    • Don't. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by TheOnlyCoolTim ( 264997 ) <tim...bolbrock@@@verizon...net> on Thursday March 20, 2003 @02:37AM (#5552407)
      At my school, I help out with all the computer stuff.

      We get so much crap dumped on us as "donations." I get to deal with a lot of it.

      If I'm lucky, it will power on and boot up. (If I'm unlucky, it will be missing the CPU or the motherboard will be cracked in half.) Then, usually, the OS is fucked up enough that it needs a reinstall, so I get to search for drivers for random Dell crap from 1996.

      Usually I just scavenge mice, keyboards, any 168-pin memory, and CD-ROM drives if they are IDE.

      My favorite donation is when some asshole gave in a monitor.

      Upon being powered up, a huge 1" arc was visible inside the back. I am told that 1" through air means about 20,000 volts. If you looked at the screen, random points of energy seemed to be sparkling from deep inside. I figured it probably was about to give me face cancer, and something inside popped and started smoking, so I turned it off.

      Tim
      • Perhaps a different spin on donating computers to school...

        A while ago I asked an electronics teachers if they wanted an old computer for their class. They took it and had a bunch of fun tearing it apart and playing around with it. While the digital stuff was a bit out of reach, they were able to hack apart the analog parts of the video and get the monitor to turn on different pixels and stuff (so I hear, I would think some of that kind of stuff could be quite dangerous). They also had great fun with th

  • Very good (Score:5, Insightful)

    by geddes ( 533463 ) on Thursday March 20, 2003 @01:57AM (#5552049)
    I was talking to a friend of mine just yesterday:

    "I have this old broken Monitor that I am going to replace - how can I get rid of it"

    "Well you can either dump it illegally or pay someone to get it recycled"

    "Well, I don't want to break any laws or hurt the environment. Who do I contact? How much does it cost?"

    "Ummm"

    This is a good solution to a dilema that many face - how to recycle thier old computer stuff ethically. This makes it easy and relativly painless - it still seems rediculous to pay to recycle the stuff, but $15 is pretty good compared to going rates.

    • Re:Very good (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I just bought an NEC monitor ( a FP2141SB, its great!). It is TCO'95 approved. Among other things, this requires that it has been designed for recyclability, and the manufacture must have an enviromental program. It appears that more manufacturers are taking enviromental concerns serious. This goes against the enviro-wackos rhetorc and standard knee-jerk news reporting ( one can't violate ones stereotypes after all). But it makes sence, after all the corporate managers and their children must live in this w

    • Re:Very good (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      In Switzerland they charge you about 5 to 10 bucks per new computer. You can give the old crap back everywhere where they sell electronic goods. Same with refigerators and other electrical and electronical devices. It's easier to dump your stuff at the local dealer than in the nearby wood.

      The prices can be found here: www.swico.ch/3d_recycling/doku/d_gebuehr.html
    • Well I live in Hennepin County in Minnesota and as a resident I can recycle all sorts of electronic equipment for the cost of gas to the recycling center.

  • recycling? how? (Score:1, Redundant)

    by newsdee ( 629448 )
    What happens to the old computers when you give them to Dell? Do they just give them away for charity, or they really dissasemble them to reuse different materials?

    If it turns out they ship them abroad for dumping, it's not much of a difference...

    • Recycling electronic material is actually a very-complicated labor-intensive process. If they are to recycle the gold (connector material), or similar metals, they are out of reach without the 'cheap-labour' from the mainland china.

      Otherwise, they have to take a loss, which a business won't tend to do so.

    • Re:recycling? how? (Score:3, Informative)

      by msimm ( 580077 )
      They "transport it to an EPA [epa.gov] approved recycler" like it says. Of course the real question is what to they do with it, which is covered here [crra.com] in a story aptly title Exporting Harm.

      • Re:recycling? how? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by anubi ( 640541 )
        Msimm:

        Thank you for that link to crra. That is quite informative - exactly what I have been fearing.

        Our fascination with the very latest in technology is producing piles of junk. This is the reason I have been so frustrated at the Big Corporations which drive the market when they cease supporting the older stuff in order to force us to buy the later stuff, which is often incompatible with the earlier hardware, thus forcing junkage.

        Example: Win 95 runs on 486 and earlier Pentiums just fine. It was des

  • Look.. This is a wonderful first step and frankly I am glad that it is an option for those folks who want to spend the time and the money. But america has turned into a nation of people with no attention span and it takes quite a lot of time to find a box.. find peanuts..arange for the delivery and...mmmmm.. new program on Tivo... ... ..
    .

  • Good idea (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is obviously a good program, one that is definitely filling a void. Keeping the toxic trash in our computers out of landfills is sorely needed.

    Fifteen dollars isn't much, and letting Dell haul it away is easier than trying to cram a monitor down your garbage disposal.

    However, whether most people will actually be willing to recycle old computers for $15 when they could dispose of them nearly as easily for free, remains to be seen.

    • Re:Good idea (Score:2, Interesting)

      by RLiegh ( 247921 )

      However, whether most people will actually be willing to recycle old computers for $15 when they could dispose of them nearly as easily for free, remains to be seen.

      Some will, some won't. To me, the really big question is; how long until it's a realistic option for we computer users who live in the boonies (eg: alaska)?

  • Old stuff value (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pdan ( 624244 ) on Thursday March 20, 2003 @02:03AM (#5552102)
    Old computers either still have enough juice to be usable, or are so old that they are gaining value for collectors (check prices of some Sinclair models). So charity or eBay seem to be better solutions than paying somebody to take stuff away.

    • I agree, the eBay is actually a good place to sell computers as they will surely not dump it to dumpsters since they've paid the premium to get your computer (sometimes money _does_ matter...)

      my 0.02
    • The problem is that there's a huge space between the two sections you quote.

      What do you do with a 486? Even the nicest configured 486s are too slow for most applications, and rarely have worthwhile spares. I have a whole box of fast-page SIMMs, small-denomination DIMMs, and propriatery memory modules I'll never use, and finally gave up on my collection of 500M and 1G hard discs, when I decided I couldn't RAID them into anything usable.
      • The harddisks are nice (provided that you checked for error) for most embed tasks. I've used many old 540MB Harddisks for gaming machines in arcade game center machines. Many new vendors are using 20GB model though, but i think that's overkill since the whole system fits in 300MB of space, but CD-ROM based system are proven dead (The CD-drive will die in weeks with stresses like that.)
        • If you're turning to used hard discs, this screams "empty niche! Exploit me!" I bet a single platter, 3600 rpm (for reliability), IDE drive would be perfect. Since the tech is old and proven, and the market demands reliability, put a five year warrantty on them and sell them at criminal prices.

  • Dear Dell (Score:3, Funny)

    by Charlton Heston ( 588481 ) on Thursday March 20, 2003 @02:12AM (#5552189) Homepage
    All of my used computers are riddled with bullet holes. Will you still take them back?

    Sincerely,

    Chuck

  • I've got an idea....... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MegaHamsterX ( 635632 ) on Thursday March 20, 2003 @02:16AM (#5552223)
    Since most computers people are throwing out now are at least 486 level machines, why don't we get them back in working order, put a minimum Linux install on it with a browser and mail client and give them to people who can't afford computers. Most monitors are also usually repairable with a few dollars in parts, with the schematics it's usually something that can be quickly fixed.

    Is there an existing non-profit organization that could start a thing like this nationwide?
    Also, you could write you time off on your taxes at the end of the year if that mattered to you.

    Does this sound workable to anyone?
    • Kinda workable. Who is going to volunteer to do 'support' for these people once they have the computers? That is - show them how to connect to an ISP (in linux no less...pppconfig? LOL!) so that they can so much as access a newsgroup and get told to RTFM?

      In otherwords; I think support is a big issue. Otherwise, we can sell them old 80's macs and teach them how to make fishtanks out of them. ^_^
      • From what I heard kde has a great gui PPP config tool. I'm also sure a local ISP would support the special version of linux if it gave them a monolopy on there money. It would be trivial to write a perl script that asks for your username, password, and which access number you would liek to use and edit the ppp confil file with all other things being equal. The geeks assembling these things would get the modem working in them. Heck, when recieving one of these computers, the end user could opt in for the int

    • Re:I've got an idea....... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by toddestan ( 632714 ) on Thursday March 20, 2003 @02:38AM (#5552416)
      Well do you want to do it? How long do you think it would take to set it up and configure? What happens once you give it to someone, then something craps out? Do you really want to be stuck supporting all these various old computers, each one different than the others?

      Personally, I would not want to spend my day trying to get Linux running on a bunch of 486/Pentium class systems. Supporting the old hardware, obscure drivers for sound, video, and CD. All the flakey hardware too, enough to make me pull my hair out.

      Also, I find that many of the faster computers that get thrown out not because they are too slow it's because they are simply cheap peices of shit. Hell, recently I recycled a 333Mhz machine (eMachine), a 200Mhz machine (Packard Bell), 380Mhz (no-name pile of crap). These computers were plenty fast, but they simply crashed if you looked at them the wrong way. I kept and still use two HPs, a 75Mhz and a 100Mhz which are both rock solid.

      Probably what you would end up doing is taking the best computers in the lot, and trashing the rest because it's too old/too flakey/not supported/not worth the time/simply busted/etc. And you are back to your old problem, what to do with the 9/10 or whatever computers that you don't want?

    • I've come across something like this up here actually. It's obviously workable, as these [reboot.on.ca] guys have been doing it for a couple of years now.

    • "Most monitors are also usually repairable with a few dollars in parts, with the schematics it's usually something that can be quickly fixed."

      You must have a lot better access to monitor schematics than most of us. Care to hook me up with one for a Compaq 470A?

  • I'm not quite sure what that slashdot story was about... but I've always been a fan of computer recycling ala mr. baseball bat (see Office Space) or thrown out of high speed moving vehicle.

  • Removing Equipment (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Stargoat ( 658863 )
    Three Questions 1. What are they getting by doing this? It can be expensive to remove equipment. (Anyone want an IBM 3174? It's going for 99 cents on Ebay.) A couple of commercials might be a better use of the money. 2. What are they doing with the hard drives and are they informing the donators of hardware of this potential worry? Data could be restored, even when fdisked. 3. Who are they going to outsource to pick this equipment up?
  • Somebody tell the Dell Dude to yank his stash out of his mini-tower before it gets picked up...
  • Will they pick up non-Dell hardware?

    If so, that would be really cool.

  • Interesting (Score:2, Interesting)

    by wholecake ( 640250 )
    Now I can properly dispose my old Dell to make room for a new UltraSparcIII :-)

    This reminds me of the time my brother and I got into an argument (kinda stupid actually) about the volume verses mass of a computer monitor.

    This is a true story!

    My grandma had this really old Packard Bell VGA monitor that was basically worthless (soon to be replaced) and my brother threw it in the trash can. I said to my brother, do you think a monitor would float or sink if thrown in a body of water!

    We discussed the weight
    • I like the disclaimer at the end but I do have to know one thing.

      Would you have recovered and properly disposed of the monitor had it sunk?

  • Security (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pdan ( 624244 ) on Thursday March 20, 2003 @02:36AM (#5552405)
    I work for the Lab ran by Departament of Energy. We have lots of old but still usable computers (on PII 500 level). The only problem is that they cannot be taken offsite for security reasons, and nobody wants them on-site. The security is so tight that when harddrive in one of new Dell boxes had to be replaced, the old broken one couldn't be taken by the serviceman (which is the usual policy).

    The problem is thas institutions like this have the biggest stores of old crap and nothing can be done with this.

  • C'mon (Score:4, Insightful)

    by djupedal ( 584558 ) on Thursday March 20, 2003 @02:38AM (#5552417)
    Dell will hand this off to some contractor...the contractor will get part of the $15.00, and Dell will squander the rest.

    The illegal aliens that actually do the curbside retrieval will simply drive around the corner and chuck your old box into the dumpster behind the pet store.

    What is being touted as gleam in Dell's shiny good-neighbor smile is just another scam to polish a public image, gather personal info that can be sold to some marketing wonk, and make you pay for the honor.

    The odds of any equipment actually being properly recycled are as low as ever...that means next to nil.

    The only way to know that your old equipment is being disposed of properly is to do it yourself.
    • What is being touted as gleam in Dell's shiny good-neighbor smile is just another scam to polish a public image, gather personal info that can be sold to some marketing wonk, and make you pay for the honor.

      What's going to happen to Dell's public image when the story breaks that the illegal aliens (nice ad hominem racist statement there btw) working on this program for them are disposing of the computers illegally?

      For the low low price of $15, it becomes Dell's problem to make sure proper disposal happens
      • But what does Dell do with them? I expect they sell them to scrappers, who in turn wholesale out some of the parts and ship the rest to China, where they're dismangled in the usual way (previously discussed hereabouts).

  • Throwing out computers?? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by fafalone ( 633739 ) on Thursday March 20, 2003 @02:40AM (#5552437)
    There's got to be alternatives:

    -Give them to people who can't afford a computer.
    -Leave them running distributed computing programs in the basement (SETI@Home, etc)
    -Give them to me, and I'll take out the hard drive and add it to my array. Monitors would also be great, always need more of those. I'll even pay for the shipping if you want to get rid of it bad enough to pay $15!

  • What a RIP (Score:2, Informative)

    by DeathBunnyRanger ( 640362 )
    In San Diego we have a company that will haul ANY electronics that has PCB's and CRTs for $0.39 a lb. Dell is gonna make a lot of money on this one. To think they are being nice to the enviroment too :P
    • I would guess that your experience is shared by people in large metropolitan areas.

      Out in the smaller cities and towns however the situation is quite different. Monitors have a $25 FEE you have to PAY to get them taken. TV's for some reason are cheaper (less lead?).

      This Dell deal saves me $10 per. unit.

      The local "recycling" (city run) guys wont take computer parts at all. Just the monitors. Dell seem to be grabbing the whole lot.

      Though I doubt that the recycling efforts will get too popular until it
  • When I was a college freshman the CS department was trying to get rid of their punchcarding Harris H800A mainframe; it was using about 65% of the capacity of the hallway of the geosciences building and the talk was, anyone who could haul off the beast could have it.

    I checked the Dell Terms and Conditions and couldn't find where it said the offer was limited to "personal" computers; maybe I missed it.
  • this is probably just Dell's effort to get into the highly profitable data mining business. There's no telling how much money they can make by selling the secrets of aol user's IM habits.
    Seriously, some of these "useless" 500mhz machines they acquire could probably be used very well at a linux lab in a lower income school district.

  • I do my part at my work... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cr0sh ( 43134 ) on Thursday March 20, 2003 @02:51AM (#5552509) Homepage
    In a way, I suppose...

    Recently, my work threw out a nice Compaq Presario 1610 laptop (P150, 1.6gig, cd-rom, built in speakers), simply because the screen wouldn't come on. I pulled it apart, replaced the backlight with one from Fry's Electronics, and will soon be getting a 64 MB SODIMM from Kingston. I later plan on upgrading the hard drive to something more reasonable (probably a 4.3 gig drive), and dropping Debian or something on it.

    A couple of years ago I grabbed a PowerTower 166 they didn't want anymore - one of these days I will put YDL on it and play.

    My work throws out a lot of stuff, I try to rescue as much of it as I can, and give it to those who can use it. I have a bunch of motherboards that could make great firewall bases, or robotics dev platforms for the right motivated people...

    • Same here. I've finally got to where I turn up my nose at 486s, but that's mainly because 1) I have more first-generation Pentiums than I can use as it is, and 2) it's getting hard to find the right ISA and VLB parts (VLB I/O cards seem to have all pretty much died as a group as of 3-4 years ago), and the HDs those ancient BIOSs can support are pretty much gone from the dumpster market.

      The slowest machine I still use myself is a P120 (rescued from the trash, complete and 100% working; it's now my "luggable
      • I tend to shy away from 486s, unless it has a unique motherboard - then I just take the board if it looks OK (I store them in rubbermaid tubs at home). I will generally rescue the board if it is one of the AMD/586 systems, especially if it is on one of those original boards they came on (can't remember the manufacturer, but they were a great motherboard/cpu combo for the time)...
        • They're pretty tough, so long as they don't get outright bent or stepped on. As to unique -- I once saw a *286* motherboard (with a 12MHz CPU tho I forget which type) that had a single *72 pin* SIMM socket! Now, I'd seen 286 boards with four 30pin SIMM sockets, but 72pin??! Wish I coulda glommed onto it, just for weirdness value.

          By coincidence, my most recent gleaning is a Socket3 board that's sortof a glorified 486 -- has PCI, ISA, and VLB slots (VLB + PCI means it'll never be stable, but..), UMC chipset
  • I guess if you're one of the many who have turned your pc into a bong, Dell sends their newest delivery/pickup driver [216.239.33.100].


    I love the fact that you can only find this page in the google cache... :)

  • I feel ripped off. (Score:2, Informative)

    by El Jynx ( 548908 )
    The Dutch taxing system holds that all computer components have to be sold with "recycling tax" included. And I was so looking forward to a Dell truck dropping by at my doorstep, too.

    Jynx

  • Whew! (Score:3, Funny)

    by n3rd ( 111397 ) on Thursday March 20, 2003 @03:23AM (#5552745)
    I'm glad I can get rid of my outdated P4 2.8 GHz now that I've upgraded to a P4 3.06 in an environmentally friendly manner.

    Thanks Dell!
    • I feel depressed. People are throwing away PCs which are better than my current one and what makes it worse is that it the most valuable thing in my appartment. Damn you technology!

  • post it to a LUG (Score:4, Interesting)

    by asv108 ( 141455 ) <asv@nOspam.ivoss.com> on Thursday March 20, 2003 @03:40AM (#5552846) Homepage Journal
    Anytime I have old hardware laying around the house that is not worth selling on ebay, I just post an offer to my local LUG mailing list, within 5 mins there are multiple offers to pick it up for free.

  • Security (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rf0 ( 159958 ) <rghf@fsck.me.uk> on Thursday March 20, 2003 @03:40AM (#5552847) Homepage
    Its great to see Dell do this and then pass it onto charity. I just can't help wonder though if they make sure the hard disks are wiped before passing them out. There have been many cases of where private information has ended up in the public domain.

    Also on a side note I just looked at the advertising graphic at the top, one of the 5 text ones. Its advertising in order (left to right)

    Dell, itdisposal.com, Dell, Dell and Dell :)

    Well looks like they've got their targeting data right

    rus

  • I'll pick them up for free! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Eneff ( 96967 ) on Thursday March 20, 2003 @04:12AM (#5553017)
    So long as they're within the last 5 years or so. I figure I could handle about 500 of them?

  • Dell Offers Mailing List Subscription for $15, Oh, and They'll Pick Your Ass-Tasstic PC Up Too and get a Tax Write-Off.

  • microsof--- oh wait.. no.. (Score:3)

    by Wakkow ( 52585 ) on Thursday March 20, 2003 @05:42AM (#5553477) Homepage
    When reading the headline, "darker side of computer recycling", I somehow thought the "darker side" was going to be Microsoft in some form or another .....

    I really should stop reading slashdot so often.
  • My friend in China has just mentioned that their company is gonna upgrade the PC park, which includes some Dell servers. Can Dell pick their computers from China? That would be a real news: "Dell is picking up PC junk from China to recycle upon EPA approval instead of sending PC junk to China".
  • Imagine a Beowul@%$#&!NO CARRIER
  • So when you are locked up for file trading [slashdot.org], Dell can use your prison labor [theregister.co.uk] to recycle old pc's!!!!

    Wonder why both these initiative are coming from Texas? Hmmm ....

  • Freegeek and the ACCRC (Score:2, Informative)

    by lucasw ( 303536 )
    Don't forget about FreeGeek [freegeek.org] in Portland, Oregon and the Alameda County Computer Resource Center [accrc.org]. The take donated equipment, recycle some and install Linux on the less antiquated computers for interesting projects and donation to needy individuals.

    FreeGeek has an interesting concept: anyone who volunteers for 8 hours can take one of the Linux boxes home and take classes on how to use it.

    There's a small profit to be made on scrap and precious metals that can be stripped out of old computers, which is part
  • Seriously, Old computers don't have to run old software. Many oganizations aren't aware that they could pay a grand or two for a server and then run old machines as thin clients. Many people seem to have the idea that you must buy an individual powerhouse for each node, and this is a huge deterrent. When you throw in the costs of licensing proprietary software, hardly anyone can afford this type of solution. I just finished a project like that in a rural county in west texas. These kids were still learning
  • I can only comment on the local area, but this is information I have first-hand knowledge of:

    Goodwill Industries [goodwill.org] wants your old but working computer crap. Check with your local Goodwill organization (the main site [goodwill.org] can help you with this) to see if they are one of the sites that handles electronic goods and appliances. In Delaware it's the Lea Street facility that takes them.

    The State of Delaware will recycle broken electronics [dswa.com] for free (sort of mostly free to you, that is - the state's taxes pay

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