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https://www.pcmag.com/news/avoid-the-trash-heap-15-great-uses-for-an-old-pc
In 2019, after seven years of slumps, PC sales went up by the tiniest increment—0.3 percent. Demand then surged in recent weeks as people shifted to work-from-home setups due to COVID-19 quarantines. Which means some of you may be getting a new computer. But what do you do with the old PC?
You may be tempted to go the easy route and just junk it. But don't. If that laptop or desktop was created any time in the last decade, you'd be surprised by how much life you (or others) can get out of it. I'm not talking about limping along, but of ways to bring an old PC back to useful life.
[This editor can vouch for plenty of life in old boxes. For the past 4 years, a now-nearly-decade-year-old Core 2 Duo Laptop with 6 GB RAM has been my primary computer.--martyb]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Thursday April 30 2020, @02:08PM (7 children)
While some suggestions are good, many are horrible. The always-on solutions NAS/access point/Folding-at-home/... are outright abominations. Apart from being economically terrible (in Europe, calculate wattage * 2 as a lower bound for cost in Euro/year), they are a total energy waste in themselves thereby negating the very point of the article. Please consider recycling e-waste as this can reduce the strain on human and environmental resources otherwise imposed by their mining.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Thursday April 30 2020, @03:33PM (1 child)
Wow that's about twice the cost in the USA, where its about one buck per watt-year.
Sometimes not too clear on the economics. I bought a "big name" FreeBSD based NAS and expensed it (use it solely for a specific work project) and it was WAY over a kilobuck. It only draws like 10 watts compared to a repurposed device. So I spent $1500 to save 90 watts, in a simplistic fashion. It'll pay for itself in power savings in a mere 17 years, about 8 years in euro-land. The project it was used for ended two years ago, LOL, so I only missed the breakeven point by 14 or so years.
Another interesting way to look at the economics is college tuition is equal to gigawatt-hours of energy and fancy corporate training on a similar time basis is like tens of gigawatt-hours of energy at normal prices. I can run an electric ceramic kiln 24x7x365 for roughly a century for the cost of tuition for a college fine arts degree in ceramics (not that I'm interested, just saying). Just saying electricity as a line item in the cost of self-education is easily measurable and can be marketed as evil, but rounds down to practically nothing in comparison to all other self education related costs. Its up there with worrying about destroying forests by purchasing a textbook.
ewaste mostly gets dumped in the USA after flowing thru ten shell companies as opposed to actually being recycled, which is another issue. The lead solder in the old server in my basement can't contaminate your lake water supply because its in my basement, not "recycled" by being dumped in the watershed for the lake.
(Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Friday May 01 2020, @05:10AM
Here in the middle of euro-land we do recycle e-waste [recupel.be]. You have to pay a so called Recupel tax on electronic goods. This tax is used to process your electronic waste. You can bring it to a container park and deposit it free of charge (that is, you already paid for it through the Recupel tax).
We also have world renowned companies that mine for example gold and other materials from that e-waste [umicore.com].
Most of the people in euro-land consider dumping such e-waste after flowing thru ten shell companies barbaric and prehistoric. Or at least a sign of utter incompetence at the political leadership level plus a complete lack of willingness in the population to punish politicians for not doing anything about it.
Also, it's not a bad thing that electricity is expensive in euro-land. This makes people consume less of it and produce more of it (with for example solar panels).
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday April 30 2020, @04:07PM (2 children)
I draw the line at what a modern Raspberry PI can do. If an old PC isn't at least as good as a Raspberry PI, then it should be junked.
Going forward, more Ras PIs today mean fewer big junk PCs tomorrow.
Monitors typically last across multiple generations of computer. (Hey Apple, hear that!?)
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Thursday April 30 2020, @11:37PM (1 child)
So what's the line then? I haven't played with the Pi 4, but my Pentium III systems run circles around the Pi 3 despite the Pi 3 having an advantage in the RAM department. A Pentium 4 completely crushes the Pi 3 in terms of performance. Then again, maybe that's why I still have all those old Pentium III/Pentium 4 boxes even though I don't use them. Well, except the one Pentium III that's been serving as a router now for something like 15 years.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday May 01 2020, @02:26AM
Raspberry Pi 4 Review: The Gold Standard for Single-Board Computing [tomshardware.com]
Those are the benchmarks from launch. It is likely faster in some cases since new firmware updates [raspberrypi.org] should eliminate thermal throttling scenarios, and overclocking from 1.5 GHz to 2.0 GHz is possible even with passive cooling (e.g. aluminum FLIRC case).
It's considerably faster than the Pi 3B+. Pi 4B has been compared to a 2007 desktop, but it could be better in some areas. Performance can be increased more by using an external SSD over a USB 3.0 port instead of a microSD card.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Thursday April 30 2020, @04:18PM (1 child)
Another thing.
What you mention about electricity cost is even worse for old servers.
Rewind to about 2008 . . .
Hey, cool, I can get some old servers from work for personal use! Woo hoo! (after they've been thoroughly wiped)
Not so fast. These may look like an over sized desktop mini tower, but:
* they are big
* extremely heavy
* very noisy
* have redundant power supplies, and power hungry
* typically multiple drives RAIDed
* redundant network connections, etc
. . . and while they were fantastic when they were new, they are truly obsolete now.
These type of machines (in my experience) are built like tanks. Indestructible. They can run forever, it seems. But they do not make good pets. Send them to electronic recycler.
Server machines: phenomenal cosmic powers, itty bitty VGA connector
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Thursday April 30 2020, @11:46PM
The other problem I found with old servers, particularly from ones from OEMs like Dell, is that they are/were just plain weird. I remember playing around with some Dell servers about that time that were probably 7-8 years old. Take a 7-8 year old standard Dell tower or desktop, and you can install Linux on it no problem. But take those servers, and there was all kinds of strange incompatibilities, hardware that identified as one thing but acted like something else, odd settings in the BIOS that I couldn't find out what they did, refusal to work with random PCI cards I had around, and even when I got it running it never acted stable. Even on the Windows side it wasn't any better. The servers were originally running Windows 2000, but getting Windows XP on them was no easy feat, and even once installed there was a bunch of hardware with no drivers.
I found it vastly easier if I wanted a cheap server was to take one of the Dell Optiplex desktops, throw a second drive in and do software raid in Linux, and put it on a UPS. Easy to setup and those Optiplexes were solid machines despite the weird Dell form factors.