[1998kingbong]

I am not as bad of shape as some of my friends. They show me there 3,000 laptop from the 90's. Unable to throw it away because of what they paid for it. Me I just have a bunch of old laptops that work fine. My dell is probably over ten years old. An hp that sucked from the day I brought it home, bad wireless card, cooling fan, touchpad. I use that one to loop a cd. Then there is the slow as could be acer with vista on it.
The main problem is the stuff is all good, just do not need it, do not want the hassle of selling or charity. The rifle range seems to extreme!
What to do?

 

[markmitch]

well I have an old dell with xp on it that is to slow to do much anything with in my garage , I use it to keep track of tune ups, oil changes etc.. other then that you could use the old stuff to teach kids how to use them or something.

 

[97cargocrawler]

I have several laptops and desktops. I keep a few in the house...a few in the garage...one at work. I have a very expensive HP laptop that was prolly one of the last ones with a RS-232 serial and parallel port, floppy drive and easily removed hard disc. I keep that one pristine to run my JET tuner and all diagnostics on the van that require RS-232. It can connect to the internet wirelessly but I only allow it to upgrade software.

I tend to throw slow laptops out the window. For real. Then i pull the heat sinks and the disc. Usually I don't think ahead and remove the disc before its tossed. I literally just get so f'ing pissed the laptop becomes a frisbee. So for that reason I try to just use them for surfing the net, not my TOP SECRET porn stash or personal files.

Slow desktops I use for redundant mass storage.

If I were you I'd just leave them on the street with a note that says FREE. Some tinkerer or poor kid will find it and treasure it. Just be sure to format the disc first.

 

[redfury]

craigslist. You'll have them all gone in 24 minutes.

 

[Big_kid]

Take the hard drives apart and play with the magnets. They're really strong on one side, and practically nothing on the other.

 

[Leeann_93]

Take the hard drives apart and play with the magnets. They're really strong on one side, and practically nothing on the other.

This is what I do. The magnets are fun. Then put the platters back on the spindle and spin away. That's fun, too.

 

[paulo57509]

I've tried to re-purpose the old notebook pc's that I own.

I have a really old Zeos laptop that I used for work but now use to use to program the speed controls on my R/C cars. This one I probably should pitch. I've been out of the R/C car scene for a few years now. I don't recall if it will even boot without a good battery in it.

I have an old IBM ThinkPad that I bought used and upgraded back in the mid-2000's for use when traveling. Now I just use it to read/burn EPROMS and data log with my vintage Moates APU1. This one is still a keeper but it's too old for net surfing.

I bought an HP netbook really cheap (~$100) just months after dumb phones made them obsolete. I still use this at work because (1) we're not allowed to load or own s/w on the work machines and (2) my personal s/w is all old 32-bit stuff. I still take this one on the road with me.

 

[Lumpy]

I have an old IBM Thinkpad with Win-95. Takes about 5 minutes to boot up. Seriously. I leave it on (with a screen saver) with a spreadsheet filled with reloading data. Hitting any modern web pages is out of the question on that slow processor. It's essentially a wall chart in electronic form.

Lump

 

[Jumper]

Install ubuntu
:2: give it some extra life.

 

[chevymaher]

Install ubuntu
:2: give it some extra life.

I have tried that 5X on different things before. It just locks everything up.

 

[ceedj]

I sometimes get dead one's from customers, and use the parts.

An HP lappy from 08ish netted me two 500 GB hard drives and a blu-ray player and a working LCD panel. The drives are now paired with my Raspberry Pi for a file server/DLNA server and the panel went into an art box that became my portable (sort of) PS3.

Got a used Dell Optiplex desktop from a yard sale for $15; cleaned it up, added some Artic Silver to the Pentium 4 HT (PresHOTT!) and a 1 GB memory stick I had laying around, boom, new Win 7 machine for one of the boys. Looked up the cost of one of these refurbed, $160!!! Guess I got a good deal on that!

Brother in law found me a non working Dell touchscreen all in one PC. Pulled the fans, hard drive (500GB, went into my personal machine) and the panel; the processor is identical to the one in my personal machine (Dual Core Pentium), so found my old board, cleaned it up, slapped it all into a GIANT HP ATX tower case (Win 98!) and gave it to the other boy.

I love me some dead PCs. :dance:

 

[Lumpy]

My newest computer is older than what you guys are describing as old.

Lump

 

[Big_kid]

I recently picked up a Dell 540 laptop I needed for work. The one I had finally quit completely, so they gave me a newer(but still previously abused and beat up) dell with Win7. The equipment I work on requires a serial port to communicate, and some of the programs I use will not run in 7. I have USB serial port replicators, they sometimes work, sometimes not. I have virtual XP loaded on the 7 machine, it still doesn't do what I needed it to. I decided to get on fleabay and buy myself another 540 identical to the one I had. I found one, only difference is that this one runs Win2K (and a few keys are missing from the keyboard). I won the $9.99 auction, paid the $15.99 to ship it here, deleted Shelly's homework and 12 pics of a LAME party, and I've got a laptop that does what I need it to do when I need it to do it, no adapters, no dongles, no hassles. I just make it a point not to connect to anybody's network with it- which I may have done twice in the past 16 years.

 

[markmitch]

I took the hard drive out of my broken dell laptop and use it to load files for my Astro. Anything that I may wish to use later i find online for automotive purposes I load onto that now external hard drive. its a 500GB drive so its good for a while. I have a desktop pc with windows 8 in the garage I attach it to using a harness I bought on ebay.