21–30 of 57 posts
Once I no longer need my computer I try to donate it to someone. There are some charities that will fix/upgrade them and give them to someone else. I like the reuse concept (as a general rule I buy refurbished equipment when ever I can) so if you don't need it any longer, maybe someone else would find it useful?
I donate excess computers I don't need anymore that are in serviceable condition to local charities: there are lots of under-served communities that need laptops and routers and modems in this day and age with remote learning during lockdowns, etc.
The rest I try to tear down for useable parts (to keep the frankencloud running) and the rest I recycle as best I can.
I've taken my stack of old laptops and created a microk8s cluster out of them for the purpose of self-hosting random stuff.
My family's previous retired laptops were 2 old HP Core i3 4th gen models. With 1366x768 15" screens, one of which was cracked. One would blue-screened randomly after a few hours even with a OS reinstall. I stripped them down and sold the motherboard and RAM of the non-blue-screening one on eBay and made about $80.
The rest was recycled because, what would I do with them? If I wanted a Plex server, a Raspberry Pi 4 is powerful enough for most things that don't need transcoding, and consumes far less power and physical space (laptop motherboards are not very space efficient for a server unless you got a super long and thin case for them).
I'm using Apple since 2014 and realised I've gathered quite stack of old Macs (one Macbook Air, one MBP and one iMac). I've installed Linux in all of them for the heck of it and its quite a welcome break for macOS.
I try use the old Macbook Air only as a thin client (tiling window manager and most TUI applications for IRC, email, coding, remote admin, etc).
Piggybacking on this, but what's everyone doing with their 3g phones? My family has like 5 of them that will supposedly no longer have service in '22. Can we donate these somewhere? The newer ones can still install android apps, send and receive email, etc. I thought about donating them to a shelter but I'm not sure if they'd have a use for them.
Piggybacking on this, but what's everyone doing with their 3g phones? My family has like 5 of them that will supposedly no longer have service in '22. Can we donate these somewhere? The newer ones can still install android apps, send and receive email, etc. I thought about donating them to a shelter but I'm not sure if they'd have a use for them.
I've taken my stack of old laptops and created a microk8s cluster out of them for the purpose of self-hosting random stuff.