Discussion on:

10 things to do with old computing equipment

A suggestion is to use a refurbisher/disposal agent who will wipe the old eqpt and sell it. The costs are deducted and the remaining pot of money is available to you. In the UK, our charity - In Kind Direct - works with the refurbisher RDC and some blue-chip clients such that a proportion of the pot is donated to our charity. We use this to source new eqpt for our charity network rather than offering them the redundant stock. Thus the old machines are securely retired, the charity is supported and the corporate can see a modest return, too. The corporate donor can even get a report on how their donated pot was used within the charity sector. All we need is more corporate supporters. For US corporates, see our US cousins - Good360 - who have other solutions, too.

I use my old computers for practice since i only been in the computer field for only 1 year i like to practice on the old one before i go to a uses house. It really helped me with PATA drives since there is not computers that use them no more but it great to know, you never know when you will have to see one

Older computers make GREAT local NAS solutions. For file storage the memory and processor requirements are not that intense. This works really well for engineering or other groups with more localized and larger data volume requirements. The only downside is it WILL become one more computer that will need to be worked into a regular backup schedule.

Another note, older computers also make for GREAT Apache / Linux web servers. Depending on the requirement and how robust the hardware is you can even use them for web production purposes (or development as you mentioned). The nice thing about the Apache web development is that other than production specific sizing it can generally mirror production environments.

Bill Wood - President
R3Now Consulting
Navigating IT. High Performance Now!
http://www.R3now.com

I work in a Wastewater Treatment facility and we are still using IBM NT machines, Win 97, some Win XP. I collect old machines to replace the broken ones here. We even have a Network 17 printer running, got 4 more for spare parts!

Obsolescence is just a lack of imagination.

Sometimes it makes little sense to keep older power hungry equipment running. The power bill to keep some machine running can often exceed the replacement cost. However SSD drives and Ram seem to give older equipment a new lease on life and cut power usage.

You missed Freecycle.org

We keep our equipment for more than 3 years. Some as long as 7 as long as they still work. When we do retire them, we do almost all of the above. My favorite is cannibalizing. Sometimes PCI Cards are hard to come by these days, so we just pull out one from one of the PCs which has a dead motherboard or something.

We are refurbishing old computers (pentium 4 of better) and sending them to places where people cannot afford computers so that a computer center can be set up and people can be taught and get on the internet. We do this from a Christian prospective.
www.HandsToServe.org

Steve Simmons
Chairman of the board.

Old PCs also useful for internal "digital signage" solutions along with wall-mounted monitors or TVs. eg Xibo - a free digital signage solution. We use this to show product videos, staff information (eg restaurant menus), competitions, company news, and even weather and traffic information to visitors in reception and staff around site.

The Sarasota PC Refurbishing Group, check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElY95x2H--w
has refurbished and donated to an entire list schools and other charities over 6000 computers and the last 10 years. A group of dedicated computer savvy volunteer members refurbishes them and donates them to children and persons who otherwise would not be able to afford a compputer.

I think many home users can make good use of older computers. Even if it's Win XP. Most people surf, email, facebook. A single core 2.4ghz Pent-4 will do just fine for average home use web surfing. In my opinion, unless you are using the latest heavy use software or video editing, there is no need to spend $600 for the kids to go on facebook or download a virus for you. The most problems I see are that users do not know how to keep systems organized and clean. I even get basic daily use from a athalon64 2.4mhz with XP and 2 gig of ram from 2005. That comes to about $60 per year.

You won't believe this, but as I read the article, I was tempted to post a NAS quetion (REQUEST).
I then decided not to, and left without reading the comments.
I then reconsidered, and opened this page again, and found there was a post about NAS.
Could you, or someone, point us to a good explanation on how to do it ?
I have a few PCs all running XP Pro SP3
I have just acquired a new router D-Link DIR632 (8 port plus a port for the connection to a modem).
I have not installed it yet, but that is what I will use, when I try to NAS
It mentions file sharing as a feature, but I have not studied that yet. But any proposed solution need not address that feature, so that it can be a more general solution for everyone.
I will be using the router wired (not wireless).

I would appreciate any assistance,
Rob

I think it is best to anticipate what to do with a old equipments when you purchase them. By adding a few percent to the price, you can extend the afterlife of hardware by several years.

For example, I built a desktop in 2004 with space for additional RAM, low power mother board with integrated graphic chipset and SATA capable:
1) An additional powerful graphic card allowed my little brothers to play until the left to University (3 years);
2) With more RAM, my mum could still use office software (4 more years);
3) Without the energy hungry graphic card and with big SATA drives (originally with PATA because of availability and price) it is now a happy file server (2 years and still running).

Rauno,
The Reply button is not working, just keeps cycling.
All I am wishing is to be able to have any of my PCs get access to some files in a central location.
My post called 'NAS' was my attempt to get help to do that.
In your post you talk about using old equipment as a 'File Server'.
It sounds like that is what I want.
Should my post have been titled 'File Server' instead ?
Are they different things ?

NAS, generally is considered a type of "plug-in" file server (oversimplified here).

Power hungry or not, the energy "savings" are not significant enough with newer equipment to offset the COST of the newer equipment. On top of that, with the recent IRS clarification that computer purchases can NOT be expensed but must be capitalized over 3 years you get an additional financial ding.

As for the concerns about hard drives I would have to ask, how many here, in their years in IT have had one fail? Of the ones that did fail, out of how many total hard drives? And how long did it run? It is *very* common for them to last many years with no problems. And that's why you have backup anyway. If you are recycling several computers you can cannibalize them for their hard drives and use RAID for fault tolerance. This way even if something happens to one drive nothing is ever lost.

As for RAID, even WinXP supports software RAID, just not on the OS partition.

You COULD use WinXP as a file server but I would NOT recommend that. Because MS is discontinuing support it could become a serious weak security link. I would look at some of the lightweight Windows Server versions (Win 2008 Standard) or possibly Linux if you are comfortable with that.

Again, with ALL things file server and data related backing up is a critical issue.

==============

One other good use for old PCs is as a print server. For that you could even use WinXP as long as you were not doing data storage. While not impossible it would be difficult to put a malware payload into a print queue that would affect the print server. So WinXP could be used for some time after support is ended if you isolate the usage to a shared print / print server box.

Just some ideas...

Errrr, I have 27 dead hard drives on my bookshelf next to my workstation. Just cause you're lucky, doesn't make hard drives immortal. They are however, much more reliable than they used to be, that's for certain. To scale, I have 21 hard drives spinning in my office at the moment; so my exposure is larger than average, but its not a one in a million thing either.

I think recylers would pay for those disks. They extract the aluminum and palladium and gold.

Did all 27 of these drives fail on your personally, or at an organization you work for? What period of time did they fail? And out of how many TOTAL drives that were available over the ENTIRE time period?

In other words, was it 27 drives that failed out of 27 (NOT!) or 27 out of a total population, or the entire period of time you collected them, of 27,000? It makes a difference.

The most common failures are the power supply and hard drive. And they aren't getting more reliable - they are getting less reliable in my experience. I'd guess around 10% to 20% of the hard drives I've owned or were responsible for fixing have failed before the disk was upgraded or the computer was considered obsolete or unusable.

NAS are a specific type of file server with hardware dedicated to servicing files and no other functions. For example, I sometimes browse the web with my server. Wikipedia explains well the small difference: "NAS devices specifically are distinguished from file servers generally in a NAS being a computer appliance a specialized computer built from the ground up for serving files rather than a general purpose computer being used for serving files (possibly with other functions)." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_server)

Great article!

One thing to add is to make sure data security is considered at every stage of the IT lifecycle. Here's a nice article highlighting the data risks involved http://www.simsrecycling.co.uk/News/Is-there-a-Data-Security-Gap and some great resources from Data Privacy Day 2013 here http://www.simsrecycling.co.uk/Data-privacy-day-2013

Sims also work with all types of customers to create tailored secure and environmentally friendly IT disposal strategies, so can advise you on the best route for you.

I'm not so sure about how good old PCs are for a NAS solution. Firstly do you really want to trust your data to drives and power supplies that are on their last legs? Secondly older PCs tend to be power hungry and they are powering a lot of additional stuff you don't really need in a NAS, plus NAS drives tend to be on 24/7 so power costs quickly mount up. If you don't care about either of these then fine, but you can get very functional, low power 'home' NAS boxes for a lot less than the price of a desktop PC.