Recycling old computers

What to do with computers that reach their end of life? Yes those old Dells running Windows XP with sub 100Mb hard drives and floppy disks. They have no resale value.

Even a half decent Windows PC has a minimum resale value.

With the price of reasonably powerful office PCs at a few hundred pounds it makes more and more sense not to upgrade the box when it starts to creak. Windows machines start to creak after a few years as the hard drives and more importantly the systems index fills up with junk. As the index fills this slowly strangles performance. This happens on MACs as well, just considerably more slowly.

If you do upgrade with, Solid State Drives (see post on moving to SSD) more memory and larger disk, you are still stuck with the fundamental performance of the CPU and motherboard. You can only upgrade so much.

We often end of life machines for clients. Usually this necessitates removing and destroying the hard disk or at least re-formatting the disk to cleanse all the data.

We then call our favourite Tech Recycling team in Farnham and they come and collect old equipment. Great guys to deal with.

What do Tech Recycling do?

From their website

What do we do? Put simply, we collect and recycle all forms of redundant IT and office equipment from companies of all sizes. We then use our technical background to, where viable, refurbish and redeploy the equipment to growing companies, charities, individuals and start-ups operating on a budget. In this way we are able to offer a free of charge recycling service, provide professionally updated and refurbished equipment and ensure all genuinely end-of-life equipment is correctly recycled. All data passed to us is securely destroyed using a process that meets or exceeds internationally recognised standards. Tech Recycle operates a zero landfill policy and does not export any equipment IT or office equipment we acquire.