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You might be sitting on a mountain of e-waste that Dell wants to recycle for you:
If you're anything like me, you struggle to let go of your old electronics. Be that a mobile phone, laptop, or even an old graphics card plagued by electromigration and capable of a frame a minute—there's something about the act of disposing of it that feels inherently wasteful. Yet it's no less wasteful of me to keep my long redundant technology stored in a cardboard box at the back of my closet.
Hence when I spotted a tweet from Dell promising to recycle my old electronics— whether manufactured by Dell or not—it caught my attention. Will the company actually take my old tech from me and do something productive with it?
To gather some more information, I reached out to the company. Because it's one thing to recycle your own product, it's a whole other to deal with somebody else's trash, for lack of a better word.
And as I would find out from Page Motes, Dell's head of sustainability, the company doesn't see it that way.
[...] Dell sees that e-waste instead as an opportunity to create closed-loop supply for certain materials.
Plastics are something the company has been recycling for some time now, using 100 million pounds of the stuff to make new parts for Dell systems, but more recently it's also begun leveraging rare earth magnets from old, disused hard drives alongside manufacturer Seagate.
Furthermore, I'm told Dell is now reusing aluminium from the old drives, and this closed-loop aluminium has since found its way into the Optiplex lineup, a range of commercial PCs that probably aren't all that familiar to PC gamers but relies on recycled materials for a large part of its construction. Something it'd be great to see make its way into more discrete PC gaming components, that's for sure.
Dell is first to admit it benefits from the program, and it also hopes that might tempt other companies to follow in its footsteps. Motes explains that it's well-aware this is not something that can be done alone, and that it'll need wider support for recycling programs to really deal with the e-waste generated every year that is, for the most part, not recycled or reused.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 23 2021, @10:40PM (4 children)
I have purchased two Dell Latitudes this year, a 2013 model and a 2015 model.
90 day warranty. I'm using other people's trash before it gets to recycling, as my main machines.
The Linux one works fine with 8GB but I can double that as necessary. I have kitted out the Windows one with 16GB of RAM, something that astonishes me that 'bargain' laptops selling new for hundreds of bucks are crippled by 4-8GB.
Windows 11? Don't need it. A big scary dialog box saying it's unsupported on a 6 year old Core i5 laptop with 16GB of RAM is maybe enough to tell Microsoft to fuck off once and for all!
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday September 23 2021, @10:58PM (2 children)
Can you stuff Windows 11 into a virtual machine where the VM software fools it into thinking it has the TPM?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @06:26PM (1 child)
So unless you have that, which is required by all UEFI SecureBoot implementations (go look it up), your system cannot attest its way to windows 11 full boot capabilities. if Windows 11 mandates it to update or boot, you're screwed. If applications require it to install or be purchased, you're screwed.
Operating a virtual TPM module is easy. But having the signed module keys necessary for it to attest, and getting the response timings right so Windows doesn't think it is out of sync is a major government, corporate, or criminal op only, unless someone manages to get and release Microsoft's signing key (that particular one should be similar in security to Intel ME/Microcode/AMD Secure Enclave, multiple parties required to sign anything, only used to sign downstream OEM vendors own keys, then sealed up tight. If it's not, it needs to be gotten, released, and then legislation passed to ban companies from every being able to lock down hardware through their own signing keys ever again. Cryptographic signatures on firmware is good. The inability to replace or override them to control the hardware you own is not.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @10:40PM
Before claiming something is impossible, you might want to check next time. Most of the major VM providers and all of the commercial ones offer it.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday September 25 2021, @02:32AM
My desktops that get regular or everyday use:
2003 - P4 (DOS)
2007 - quadcore (XP64)
2008 - quadcore (ReactOS)
2008 - quadcore (XP)
2014 - Xeon (PCLinuxOS)
2014 - i7 (Win7)
2014 - i7 (PCLinuxOS)
2014 - i7 (Hackintosh/Win10)
2014 - i7 (XP64)
The first and last listed have mainboard/CPU purchased used; the rest are all salvage. Unsupported? Do I look like I care??
And in the next room is a stack of lightly-used laptops of similar vintages, ALL salvage.
One man's trash is another man's treasure. Please, keep throwing out that perfectly useful hardware!!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.