What do you do with your old outdated PCs?

[Kyle1886]

I have crammed back in a closet and old Win-98 and I think a Win 95 PC's and neither has a LAN card. They both worked when taken out of service; both custom build, but not by me. Technology passed me by years ago.

There is a Dell something or other that was the wife's and I think it is a Win-97 with a LAN.

Normally on old computers I dismantle them, and get the magnets out of the hard-drives.

Is there something more constructive that doesn't cost. I gave all my old monitors away so I cannot really hook them up anyway.

Heck the in-play PC's we are using are long in the tooth too. (XP' is wife's which is useless and this one I'm using is W-7 from 2011 with one of the first i7 do-dads).

So do as usual and get the magnets to hold more guns and mags, or____?

Respectfully
Kyle

[cyphr02]

Pull the drives, play with the magnets, turn in the rest to Goodwill. I believe most sites accept electronics as a part of their e-waste disposal partnership with dell.

[Kyle1886]

Pull the drives, play with the magnets, turn in the rest to Goodwill. I believe most sites accept electronics as a part of their e-waste disposal partnership with dell.

Yeah, I already have about 20+ magnets holding guns and mags; I guess another few won't hurt.

Kyle

[FeuerFrei]

Anything I can't use gets a distro of Linux installed on it and is given away.

If is boots it can be useful to somebody. Back up for emergency use.

[Fizz]

Anything I can't use gets a distro of Linux installed on it and is given away.

If is boots it can be useful to somebody. Back up for emergency use.

An old 98/95 era box is useful to exactly no one. Not even third world would make use of something ~30 years old.

OP, just take it to an electronics recycler. Alternatively, most municipalities and some charities host recycling drives.

If you want SOMETHING to do with them, old CPUs, memory sticks, hard drive connectors, etc. generally have higher gold content than modern counterparts. So, you can clip the CPU pins, RAM contacts, etc. and put them in a jar that takes almost no space and accumulate enough to maybe get a small nugget worth over time. The yield is not worth the effort from a financial aspect until you get the commercial scale - but maybe gold recovery is something you'd find interesting as a project.

[Rhodester]

I dismantle it as far as I can go. I keep the bolts and nuts, just in case I might need them for something else and throw the rest into the trash can for removal. Monitors I take to a recycling center and anything else that they can use.

[ibanezfoo]

Take it to work and put them in the recycle pile, or take them to the range and blast them.

[gwanghoops]

make faraday cages out of them?

[FeuerFrei]

An old 98/95 era box is useful to exactly no one. Not even third world would make use of something ~30 years old.

OP, just take it to an electronics recycler. Alternatively, most municipalities and some charities host recycling drives.

If you want SOMETHING to do with them, old CPUs, memory sticks, hard drive connectors, etc. generally have higher gold content than modern counterparts. So, you can clip the CPU pins, RAM contacts, etc. and put them in a jar that takes almost no space and accumulate enough to maybe get a small nugget worth over time. The yield is not worth the effort from a financial aspect until you get the commercial scale - but maybe gold recovery is something you'd find interesting as a project.

That's just ignorant right there. I'm no expert but I manage to get oldies running.
If it'll POST and load an OS it will at least do some word processing.

Good luck with your gold panning.

[MrFancyPants]

An old 98/95 era box is useful to exactly no one. Not even third world would make use of something ~30 years old.

You vastly underestimate the vintage PC enthusiast crowd. It's a hot hobby right now. I have a few Win 95/98 era machines myself, as well as some XP era machines. For retro gaming on original hardware for those of us who grew up running through all that old hardware, there's nothing better.

Go on ebay and see what those old machines are currently selling for. A 486 will fetch around $500 easy. Quality CRT monitors in good condition, several hundred, and top of the line monitors like Mitsubishi Diamond Pro sell all the time in a matter of a day or two for a grand or more. Individual components often times sell for more now than they did when they were new. Got any 3dfx cards? Bank. I have a Voodoo 5 5500 video card, current average selling price on ebay about $600, twice what they cost brand new. I have 5 Voodoo2 video cards, current selling price between $200-$250 per card. Creative AWE32 and AWE64? More bank. The demand for that stuff is extreme, and supply is dwindling, you do the math. If you guys are tossing out or recycling old hardware, you're throwing away some serious cash.

OP, PM me what you've got in the closet from the Win 95/98 era if you're looking to get rid of it, I might be interested in taking it off your hands.

[I-Wanna-Move]

Old/er PC’s are pretty good at being used to run stepper motor devices so:
CNC Router
CNC Engraver
CNC Laser Engraver / Laser Cutter
CNC Plasma Cutter
Etc

There are SO MANY “CNC” gizmos and kits for sale these days. All over eBay and even Amazon. Just need a simple PC to do the CAD and then send the commands to the servo driver. Unless you extract all the gold then the PC won’t run so well.

[crufflers]

I have them picked up for free if I have the minimum number of E-waste items. I strip the cases of anything useful or that contains data, which is not much more than the HD/SSD. I do have a small collection of tower cases and complete PC's that have maybe some sentimental value, boxes of drives, etc... a few bags of ram. Periodically I might setup some slow PC with a new linux distro and play with it and use it for the web. Since I have mining rigs and two laptops, mini-pc's, that each do that and more, I do not have any need for extra junk sitting around. I have too many working PC's. Really old parts have ZERO value to me, but it sounds like I should check prices on EBAY, hahah. I have a NIB sealed MAXTOR Diamondmax Plus 30 gig that I kept because it was unique being unopened so I guess I don't E-waste everything. I keep mining rig spare parts organized but I have to actually use those rarely... risers, cables, Gold+ PSU's. That hardware rarely fails. What does fail is new DELL crap.

[sigstroker]

You vastly underestimate the vintage PC enthusiast crowd. It's a hot hobby right now. I have a few Win 95/98 era machines myself, as well as some XP era machines. For retro gaming on original hardware for those of us who grew up running through all that old hardware, there's nothing better.

Go on ebay and see what those old machines are currently selling for. A 486 will fetch around $500 easy. Quality CRT monitors in good condition, several hundred, and top of the line monitors like Mitsubishi Diamond Pro sell all the time in a matter of a day or two for a grand or more. Individual components often times sell for more now than they did when they were new. Got any 3dfx cards? Bank. I have a Voodoo 5 5500 video card, current average selling price on ebay about $600, twice what they cost brand new. I have 5 Voodoo2 video cards, current selling price between $200-$250 per card. Creative AWE32 and AWE64? More bank. The demand for that stuff is extreme, and supply is dwindling, you do the math. If you guys are tossing out or recycling old hardware, you're throwing away some serious cash.

OP, PM me what you've got in the closet from the Win 95/98 era if you're looking to get rid of it, I might be interested in taking it off your hands.

That's what I was about to say. I don't know if the used stuff sells as well as new. I used to live 2 miles from a Fry's, so I looked through their sale ads every week, and if something looked good I'd buy it for some future machine I didn't know a use for. I accumulated a lot of obsolete stuff and never built it. But now it's not obsolete, it's VINTAGE. Someday I have to get off my lazy duff and put it up for sale. 30 meg disk drives may seem ridiculous, but the o/s back then only needed 5 megs.

[crufflers]

I had big boxes of spare/take-out GPU's at one time but they were nothing good. Virge3d, Riva128, base model ATi crap... best old card I have now is a Matrox G200. I never had a Voodoo AFAIK. I have a RTX 3090 in this rig though

I do wish I still had my Atari 1040 ST.

[arrix]

Turn it into a Linux MAME arcade game box.