Posted on: Tuesday, January 13, 2004

There may be some use yet for that old PC

By Mike Musgrove
Washington Post

The afterlife of many castoff computers seems to be lived out in dusty closets, attics and basements. But that doesn't have to be so; with a little research, you can send your old PC, or at least its constituent components, off to a better place. What kind of place depends largely on the computer's age.

If it's less than 5 years old or so, give it to an organization that can place the PC in a deserving home. Older than that? Send it to a recycling program that can strip it down to its parts for reuse or safe disposal.

If your computer is spry enough to have a chance for a second life, local user groups may be your best way to find out what organizations can put the retired machine to use.

Most Goodwill outlets and a growing number of Salvation Army locations don't accept donated PCs. Some local environmental offices offer recycling options via annual or biannual events.

It's becoming easier to get the folks who sold you that computer to recycle it themselves. Dell, Gateway and Hewlett-Packard have recycling programs; Gateway (www.gateway.tradeups.com) will even throw in a rebate good toward your next Gateway purchase.

In each case, a delivery service will come and take your old junkers off your hands; all you have to do is box them up and (usually) pay a small disposal fee.

HP (warp1.external.hp.com/recycle), for example, charges $13 to $34 per item; a PC with a monitor costs $46 to have carted off. Dell (www.dell.com/recycling) charges $7.50 each for printers, monitors and PCs; the company will recycle your old printer free if you buy a new one from Dell.

Dell also lets users donate an old PC to the National Cristina Foundation, a nonprofit that provides disabled and poor children with computers.

For details on computer recycling and the recycling companies that take them on O'ahu, log onto the city's recycling Web site at www.opala.org or call 692-5410.

Whether you ship your old, lightning-fast 400-MHz machine to a new home or a computing boneyard, you should make sure you don't donate any of your old data with the machine. Simply deleting your files isn't enough; you'll need special software to overwrite them.

For example, try Wizard Industries' free Sure Delete utility for Windows (www.wizard-industries.com). Microsoft suggests the "Wipe Info" tool in Norton Utilities, a program available for both Windows and Mac users.

Other disk-cleaning options can be found on the Shareware.com Web site, and the system CD that came with the old machine can also be used to reformat the hard drive for basic data destruction.