Just been going through the loft, and I have an old PC up there that I have no reason to hang onto anymore. Does anyone know of anyone that would buy for spares etc, or failing that just to dispose of safely? Think I took the hard drive out, but it's been years so not sure.
As most student or home office computing needs can be met with budget laptops, Chromebooks or even phones/tablets, desktop PC's nowadays tend to be for gamers or for niche users who need the raw power. So unless the spec was high as purchase time and it's not that old, there's probably little market from a spares viewpoint. Try somewhere like Aspire in Sheffield maybe. Hard drives I get the need for secure data destruction and smashing the hardware is the gold standard. For domestic users, a ShredOS USB stick would be adequate I'd say. It allows you to boot into a Linux environment and gives you a GUI to securely erase and overwrite data. It would likely make recovery of data far more trouble than it's worth without rendering the drive unrecyclable. If Aspire will take, perhaps take their guidance on data destruction.
How old is it? I’m always looking for desktop cases to rebuild budget systems in. If it’s anything less than 20 years old and a standard form factor I could recycle the case for a kid’s first cheapo gaming pc. Sometimes the power supplies are still good too, I have a little device that tests them
Most local recycling centres have facilities for dealing with old tech like that. As others have said, take the HDD out and destroy it yourself. Edit, I have several old HDDs from desktops sitting in my garage that I've not done anything with yet...
If it’s a really old one, 20 years plus, it could be collectable. There’s quite a bit of interest in 90s PCs at the minute.
Seems a bit of a sad choice of words really. I know they can divide opinion but after 30 years of public service I always thought they got a pension instead. Fair play to the guy hiding the old PC in his loft. Was the loft tall enough for him to stand up with his helmet on?
You're more than welcome to it if you like mate? It's a dell PC, maybe less than 10 years old I guess?
