My wife has asked me not to turn the house into a tech junkyard.
The dump I go to every week to drop off my household garbage has an e waste shed. The guys that work there told me I can pick through it. My basement is a pc graveyard now.
This is the life I want for myself.
At my dump, you get weighed on the way in and out and you pay for the weight you drop. So, if you leave your garbage and load up some ewaste, it saves you money. They are literally paying you to take it away.
I started at the bottom with ewaste, it is truly amazing what companies will just throw away because they don’t want to deal with it.
I am really looking forward to picking up some cheap used mini PCs here in a few months after the market gets flooded from corporates disposing of their old hardware because of the Windows 10 end of life. Consumers have already started ditching them now, but it takes a minute for enterprise to get it to a disposal company who then gets to pawn it off on the used market and that’s the good stuff.
Your average company is woefully prepared to deal with ewaste. If you sell it, there are legal and financial ramifications. Assuming you could make at most a couple hundred on a box, the labor to take it someplace, deal with finance, deal with legal, deal with returns for anything that goes doa in the move. The best you can do is sell or give it to a wholesaler who will give you near nothing for it to shoulder the risk.
Whenever possible, I release old hardware to end users. Refresh it, let them give it to their kids/family/whatever.
A combination of warranty expiry, the tenancy to replace instead of repair/upgrade, Windows 10 being the go to, even after W11 launched, and the W10 end of life, all combine into a neat pile of ewaste from enterprises that’s flooding the market.
It’s a great time for those of us that use enterprise company discards as computers.
I run a Windows 7 laptop and bought a PC at Value Village and maxed out the RAM thanks to Aliexpress. Junk FTW!!
Buy e-waste? I have people give it to me for free. Offer to recycle it for them.
Yeah this is basically what I do. People like giving me their stuff because I’m transparent about the deal:
- If at all possible, I will wipe it for you.
- If it’s usable, I will either add it to my TrashCloud™ or (especially for laptops) set it up for a kid.
- Parts/devices that I cannot get working I will take to electronics recycling.
- No iPhones/iPads.
Big thumbs up from me on the no iPhone/iPad policy.
That crap is ewaste as soon as Apple inc, decides it’s not worth supporting anymore with no option to load a different OS on it. Arguably, it’s ewaste before that, but I digress.
It just sucks that the hardware is made specifically to be incapable of running anything but the OS it was built for, which is entirely controlled by a profit-driven company by way of closed source software.
Say all the bad things you want about them (I certainly do), but it’s hard to say that their hardware isn’t good. It’s just sabotaged at the factory by their firmware and OS, condemning it to a mediocre and finite existence.
I love Lemmy.
I was wondering whether I was going to have to explain that rule to a crowd of angry zealots, furious that I could possibly oppose the Great and Mighty Apple like that.
I’m not opposed to having macs in my collection (though as it so happens right now I don’t have any), because it’s not about hating Apple and entirely about whether I can do something useful with the hardware.
A majority of the ARM hardware I have is old Android phones booting a pretty standard Linux distro with custom kernels. Most of them have drivers missing for various pieces of hardware, but as long as they can boot, connect to my homelab network over USB and run containers, they make excellent build/test devices.
Does anyone have a few optiplexes lying around?
Dude I have my childhood desktop running a jellyfin server, I’d kill for an optiplex
Hot take
If the world was running on GNU/Linux for endpoints, tech-normies would still be using computers from 2010. And this would cut massively into laptop OEM’s bottom line. Therefore I think it’s a quiet conspiracy where laptop manufacturers or the computer OEMs shut up about Windows being bad because just imagine if everyone would be running GNU/Linux. You could use laptops from 2010 with “regular” distros and be completely fine. With light distros you could use things from the 1990’s for all tech normie tasks, web-browsing, text editing, e-mail, etc.
TLDR: Microshit Windows bad.
Before the arbitrary Windows 11 hardware restrictions, this was exactly what was happening on the Windows side as well. There are still tons of 10-15yo Windows devices around, happily running Win10.
“Regular” people also only upgrade their PC once the old one breaks or if they really encounter something that doesn’t work on the old PC (mostly games if they do play somewhat modern games).
In fact, Windows used to have really awesome long-term-support and forever long upgrade support. You can easily run Win10 on a quality high-performance PC from 2008. But with Win11, they just tossed all that in the drain.
What? Don’t look at me like that! I totally need 70 computers! Yes they’re useful! They all have their purpose! That one? Its job is to be force-fed whatever weird obscure Linux distribution I just heard of! Oh, that one? That’s for testing Arch Linux configs on 25 year old hardware!
My problem is that because of Linux I can almost never throw away an old computer. I’ve got a bloody netbook around here somewhere running Lubuntu.
Time to build a LAN party cafe in my basement and install all the DRM free classic FPS games I own on all the devices.
if the stack of shit laptops were dirt cheap or even free, and you are having fun tinkering with them…its still better than letting them rot in the soil.
Where does one find old tech on the cheap?
My local dump has an e-waste section. Corps straight up drop off 6x6x6 ft. tall cage totes full old laptops and desktops. Then the grandma bins full of VHS players and stuff.
There’s signs saying you can’t take anything, but nobody actually cares or stops you lol. As long as you’re not causing trouble or making a mess digging deep into them.
Check how nearby colleges and universities dispose of used assets. The state school near me maintains a very nice website where they auction off everything from lab equipment to office furniture. It’s also where all their PCs go when they hit ~5 years old and come up in the IT department’s refresh cycle. Only problem in my case is that they tend to auction stuff in bulk. You can get a solid machine for $50 to $100, but only if you’re willing to pay $500 to $1000 for a pallet of 10.
There’s about to be a lot more surplus hardware since Microsoft arbitrarily decided they can’t update to Windows 11.
And real good specs on most those machines, most will be at least DDR4 some even DDR5
My mom’s laptop self “upgraded” to win 11 a while back and she hates it and has been having issues nonstop. And since she refuses to pay a monthly subscription for office I set her up with Libre office. She’s been resistant to Linux but as I slowly add more FOSS apps she’s coming around. She’s now willing to try a Linux Mint live USB.
I’m going to be on the lookout for one of these perfectly good laptops and throw Mint on it for her so she can keep her windows laptop until she’s ready to fully make the switch.
if you want a LOT of them, govdeals.com is a way to go. You might hate me for showing you that place. Its how I ended up with a great generator for my house as well as too many servers.
“What do you mean, ‘Why do I need that stack of old ThinkPads?’. They were free!”
Where are you all getting free thinkpads from?
Make friends with your local IT guys. Thinkpads are less common these days, because they’re “Chinese”, so it is more common to find dells (which usually are worse in my experience).
Unrelated, but I just took apart my old IBM thinkpad from 2003/2004 to clean it up and get all nice and pretty for it’s last few years of updates. I also did my newer-ish HP laptop from 2016 at the same time.
The thinkpad was just beautifully laid out, with thought put into the placement of vents, heat sinks, heat generating components, alternative air pathways if the entire bottom was blocked, easy maintenance of components, etc.
The HP was …not. The weakest ass heat sink I’ve ever seen, miles away from the processor (no wonder it sounded like a wind tunnel when playing a youtube video). One intake vent where your thigh would be if in your lap and the exhaust right where your knee would be. Extra bonus was the placement of the CPU (running usually 80c+) is right above your junk, the vent being offset from the processor a smidge.
Granted I’m comparing enterprise vs consumer laptop in the days when there was a massive difference in quality between the two, but damn, this experience has me decided (again) that internal layout and design is just as important as specs, even more so if you need more powerful components.
I have a literal suitcase full if 4TB SAS drives. Because they were free and pretty much unused.
Fun fact: A pelicase of 37 3.5" drives is the max weight you’re allowed in a single checked piece with common airlines. I had to give three drives to the check in clerk.
I’d like to know where can i put my hand on a stack of free Thinkpads.
That’s exactly what I did in the late 90s/early 2000s. Never regretted it.
Try getting Linux to run on a 486 w/4MB RAM and a 40MB hard drive. You tend to learn a lot while getting the most out of that.
My go to for reliable Linux platforms is anything off-lease. Workstation class systems are extremely robust most of the time. I have some that have been in 24/7 operation since I bought them years ago and they’re showing zero signs of slowing down. I love it.
Ewaste is also a good place to look for still good but deemed unworthy of use by a faceless, soulless corporation stuff. Usually tends to be a bit older, but it’s usually fine.
Have fun friends, there’s no wrong answers.
