 5 Things To Do With Dead PC Hardware
5 Things To Do With Dead PC Hardware
Learn the five best fates for dead PCs, notebooks, hard drives, and other gear. Hint: Letting them go to a landfill is not one of them. Recycling is.
By Serdar Yegulalp, InformationWeek
April 25, 2009
Dead, but not necessarily useless.
Sooner or later, the PC I'm typing this on is bound to drop dead. One day I'll walk in here, push the power button, and hear a scrape and a clunk that tells me my hard drive is out of commission. Or, worse, I'll get nothing at all. Failing that, it's going to end up dying a different kind of death, although one that's every bit as ignominious -- it'll be yanked out and replaced with something a little more cutting-edge, because time and technology have moved on.
Whatever my PC's exact fate, there's one thing I know won't happen: This machine will not sit at the curbside and wait to be heaved into a garbage truck. In this piece I'll talk about four possible fates for dead hardware. "Dumped into a landfill" is not one of them. That's a fate worth working to avoid, especially since so many of the electronic goods that come into our hands can still be reclaimed, no matter what they're like when we're done with them.
What's A "Dead" PC?
Let's start with a definition or three. The most common definition of "dead" is "I can't use this thing anymore." Sometimes dead means too slow or clunky for your chosen use; time and utility have passed it by.
That Pentium III 650 that used to run Windows 2000 but barely boots anymore, the range of software (and hardware) it can support has narrowed drastically? It might be useful to someone who has fewer expectations from their PC, but to you, it's dead.
Sometimes dead means you've simply outgrown what you have. The system runs fine, but you've moved on to bigger and better things. For example: my 1GB single-core Centrino notebook, which I replaced with a 4GB dual-core 64-bit model -- one which, irony of ironies, cost less than half what I paid for the previous one; such is the march of technology. (Keep reading to find out the fate of the old machine.)
And sometimes dead is just dead. Billy Crystal's character Miracle Max in The Princess Bride put it best: "There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive." In other words, even a machine that doesn't boot or power on may still be good for something -- even if it's something you can't think of.
Bring that notebook out of retirement and put it to work as a file / print / media server.
1. Revival
Let's start with hardware that hasn't died, but has outlived its current use. Rather than deep-sixing it completely, perhaps it's worth putting that device to use in another context. The most common version of this is to give the hardware in question to another family member or a friend. Usually you'll do this after cleaning it up and making sure it's a) marginally functional and b) not likely to break in a way that will stump its new owner.
Cleaning up and resetting an existing system for re-use has gotten a lot easier in recent years, thanks to most systems shipping with either a restore / recovery partition, a set of recovery disks, or both. Sometimes the former are used to build the latter, when you first uncrate the machine.
That said, unless you're about as organized as my mom or as big a packrat as my dad, the odds of those tools surviving any number of office straighten-ups, household spring cleanings, and I-think-I-threw-out-the-wrong-thing shocks goes way down with time.
If you don't have the disks or the recovery partition anymore, call the PC manufacturer (they're still around, one hopes) and ask them for a recovery CD/DVD. They should be able to sell you one if you have the original OS license key sticker. Note that if you bought your system as a "whitebox" from a local, independent reseller, they probably gave you the CD. Lose that and you're generally out of luck.
Even if you haven't lost the original OS, you might do well to install a new one --Linux or Windows, depending on what's within your budget and what seems to work best. Bear in mind that Linux is no longer a one-size-fits-all proposition and hasn't been for some time; you want a variety of Linux distros that will complement your hardware well.
Linux Installation Guidelines
1-2 Years Old / Multi-Core: Any of the recent, big-name Linux distributions will do fine -- e.g., Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, CentOS, etc.
2-3 Years Old / Single-Core: Generally the same as the above, but if performance turns out to be an issue, you can go with a scaled-down build designed for economy of space and speed. Xubuntu is the most common example.
Anything Older: Go with a distribution built to be minimal. Puppy Linux is a good one, but the still-in-progress Moblin is worth a look even at this stage of its development.
2. Repurposing
Another option with an older machine is to set it up as a file / print / media server -- a way to offload duties that you don't want to foist upon your existing PC. Since a file server generally doesn't need to be the fastest machine in the world as far as user interaction goes -- it just needs to have a decent network pipe -- you can get away with surprisingly minimal hardware to make this work. For my own file/print setup I used a four-year-old notebook with a USB-attached hard drive in an external cage (a 320GB drive from another machine, which I'd replaced with a 1TB drive). Streamed HD video is probably out of the question, but MP3s and print jobs all work fine.
Usable hard drives, video cards, and memory modules may lie inside an aging PC's carcass.
3. Cannibalization
This means, of course, salvaging what pieces you can and using them elsewhere. Your average "dead" PC has at least two or three parts which by themselves are probably fine. They can generally be cycled over into another PC without trouble, especially if you're buying a new machine and want to save a few dollars here and there. Still, as with anything else, caveats apply.
Peripherals Keyboards, mice, headsets, USB hubs, removable-storage bays (such as those used for memory cards), and so on are the most common things that can be cycled over are.
If they're still in good shape, there's no reason to dump them as long as they still do what you need and will work with future hardware. One exception is PS/2-connected mice or keyboards, which can be connected to USB-only machines but only through specially-designed connectors. If you're hanging onto an older PS/2 keyboard for dear life (some people get very attached to their hardware -- me included!), the cost of an input dongle is negligible.
Hard Drives Any type of storage device is well worth keeping and re-using. Obviously anything with sensitive data on it needs to be wiped down first; see Darik's Boot and Nuke, for more on how to do this easily.
TIP: Always use new cabling, both data and power, when moving an old device. The cables you used with the hardware in its original setup may have developed crimps or bends that turn into full-blown shorts when moved into another machine. I've had this happen to me more than a few times; a hard drive that was working fine in one machine was "dead" in another—actually, just mostly dead, since all it took was a new SATA cable to bring it back to life.
Memory Modules These can usually move between machines that support them with little difficulty. There are two caveats here, though:
You might not always be getting the best possible performance on the target system.
Two, you may run into finicky behaviors you didn't see before. Systems that use server memory -- i.e., registered or ECC memory -- are a lot fussier with memory than regular machines.
The last computer I had in this regard refused to work reliably with two separate sets of DIMMs and finally only worked with a Compaq-branded set.
Video Cards These are worth pulling and saving, since what's old or outdated for one user is more than cutting-edge for another -- provided, of course, it's the right bus type. Also bear in mind that video cards can be a source of unexpected power consumption, something I discovered and wrote about here
If it looks like it's been through a war, it probably has been.
Notebooks are tougher to cannibalize, since they tend to be all of a piece. About the only things that can be reliably reused are power supplies (best used in either the same variety of notebook or one with the same wattage requirements) and hard drives.
As an aside, a good many types of hardware can go bad for no visible reason, even after years of perfectly reliable service. A lot of this depends on how it was used. If the user smoked, had a dusty office or ran everything off unfiltered wall current, any one of those alone is going to shorten the lifespan of the device in question.
Sometimes it's not possible to know whether or not these things have happened, although there are giveaways: musty odors, encrustations of dust or dirt on the fan or air intakes, etc. Rule of thumb: if it looks (or smells) like it's been through a war, it probably has been.
__________________ ''Life's tough........it's even tougher if you're stupid.'' -John Wayne
"The main difference between the wise man and a fool is that a fool's mistakes never teach him anything." -Unknown
"With age comes the realization of mortality" -Tom Woods
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