[Chester LUG] What do you guys do with old hardware

[Les Pritchard]

Hi Stuart,

There's several things you can do with old kit like that.  As you say,
they're not bin jobs yet - far from it.  There are charities that will take
the boxes off your hands and pass them on to community projects.  I could
see the laptops being particularly suited for that, but the server boxes
would also work well as terminal servers.  What I sometimes do is just pass
them on to local non-profit organisations I know of.  Perhaps this could be
a worth while thing for the Chester LUG to consider doing - collecting kit
like this and donate it to local causes....complete with Linux / BSD
installed of course!!  That could bring publicity for Linux, Open Source and
the Chester LUG as well as helping out these people.

If your company would go for that - would anybody else be interested in
doing this kind of thing?  If we share it between a few of us, I'm sure it
wouldn't be too bad.

I know several people on the list (me included!) and other friends wouldn't
mind some of the kit to play with themselves...but I'm just trying to think
of this from the good cause, Open Source style approach of benefiting the
community as a whole.  (Plus the Techies Against Sleeping on the Sofa issue
many face when bringing back "another box" ;-) )

Thanks

Les

On 10/26/06, Stuart Burns <stuart.james.burns at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Seems a simple question really, but where I work I we PAY some person to
> take away all our "old" machines.
>
> I currently have a few knocking round and it seems a pity for them to go
> into landfill because at the end of the day they are still good machines,
> but they have gotten bit rot etc and slowwwweeeed right down. Nothing a
> format and a light windows manager wouldnt cure
>
> The specs of the machines that I *may* - subject to company approval be
> getting rid of are:
>
> 4/5 Compaq Ipaqs, ranging from P2-450s to P3 800s with memory and hard
> drives
> 1 HP P3 450
> 1 PowerEdge 800
> 1 PowerEdge 450 with ~30 GB RAID array
>
> There may even be the following depending if our upgrade over the next few
> weeks goes to plan
> 1 Dual Xeon 1 GHz/1Gb RAM/19GB RAID 5 array 2u Rackmount
> 1 PowerEdge 800
> 1 PowerEdge 4300 450Mhz with ~30 GB RAID array with tape drive
>
> Problem that I have is, i use freecycle for most stuff, but unfortunatly
> with the PCs you either get a) well intentioned newbs who doent understand
> IT at all and feel they have a right to phone you up at 9pm because program
> "coolgame.exe" doesnt work or b) people take the stuff I gave for free (ie
> a few p3 machines, printers etc ) and sell them on ebay !
>
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> Chester at mailman.lug.org.uk
> https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/chester
>
>
>
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