nibot ([personal profile] nibot) wrote2005-01-06 11:57 am
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Putting old computers to good use

I am trying to get rid of the piles of computer equipment from various sources that seem to be piling up here at Location Alpha -- old PC's (from 486 to Pentium II), basically. They work fine, but we have no use for them. I think the situation is similar in many households around here.

I have heard that computer recycling is pretty much a fraud, with little actual recycling of materials taking place. Typically, from what I hear, "recycled" computers are shipped to some southeast Asian country, some valuable materials are stripped, and the rest is dumped in the river.

I just got back from a week in Baja, and while there I was impressed by how people in remote towns were able to make use of used clothing, electronics, and other items, and generally make good use of meager reasources. It occurred to me that these PC's would probably be fantastically useful to, say, a school down in some small town down in Baja. Indeed, I quickly developed visions of new Mexican hackers cutting their teeth on these venerable machines. A pentium-class machine is perfectly usable for most purposes.

Local SVUSD schools apparently have no interest in lowly Pentium class machines. I am sure, however, that there must be organisations locally interested in such machines. Certainly LAUSD schools would be interested. For some reason the Mexico thing appealed to me... a computer-fixing co-op group maybe a little bit like http://www.freegeek.org/ could set up schools in small towns with Linux-equipped computers made from the table scraps of the OC.

Old computers are definitely useful for the odd project (building weather stations, attaching your thermostat to the ethernet, etc), but I don't think they're worth keeping in storage for that reason... the hardware can be found again if needed.

Some links I have found

  • http://sharetechnology.org/ -- a database of organisations soliciting donations of old computers. An excellent concept, but their implementation could use a lot of work (volunteers?). Plenty of entries for San Diego and Los Angeles.

  • http://www.cristina.org/ -- seems well-established, but a bit of a hassel. They don't really make it very clear who they donate the equipment to, where the local drop-offs are, etc.

  • http://orangecounty.craigslist.org/ -- Craigslist is an excellent community BBS that exists for many cities. See the "for sale" under "computer" and "free"... Also maybe a good place to look for organisations that want donations. Best established in San Francisco and New York, tho.

Ideas?

I will reply to this post with a list of some of the stuff that's potentially available. Some of it I have already found new homes for.