recyling old Laptops and Desktop

[ShayOh]

Hi guys! i would like to consult with everyone about a matter..

a bit background: i move to new house, decided to care for our household trash myself, by going to the public dump, which also collects a ton of electronics.

SO i have been collecting a ton of laptops and desktops, i would say mostly from the Windows XP/VISTA maybe Windows 7 era, some of them are fully functional or just missing some components... but i dont know what to do with them. i feel like its a shame to just take them back to the public dump instead of repurposing them...

 

what could i use these computers for? usually they got an old AMD/Pentium processor, 2/4 GB of ddr2/3 ram.

 

Thanks!
 

[Needfuldoer]

They'll do anything a Raspberry Pi can. Experiment with Linux. Run PiHole or Home Assistant.

 

Honestly, don't hold onto a bunch of useless crap just because it "feels like a shame to get rid of it", and stop taking junk you don't need from the dump. They're just computers, they don't have feelings, wants, or needs. Sarah McLaughlin's Angel might start playing in your head when you see them piled up for disposal, but I promise you the computers don't care. You're just filling your new house with other peoples' garbage. Let them go.

 

 

[Isuck Assimov]

salvage all the old 18650s from old laptop batteries

[SJLPHI]

I would do what Assimov said, and maybe depending how much power they consume, and how many HDDs they support, turn one into a NAS host. Not too worth it with old machines that eat up >100W though.

[ShayOh]

On 12/14/2022 at 9:26 PM, SJLPHI said:

I would do what Assimov said, and maybe depending how much power they consume, and how many HDDs they support, turn one into a NAS host. Not too worth it with old machines that eat up >100W though.

YES! so i was planning on setting up a NAS. most hard drives i got with the computers are SATA between 150GB to even a 750GB drives laptop and a full 3.5 drives.
but i wonder about the power you mentioned. what other options i got for a sub 100W machines i have? why would an old desktop draw more then that if it only runs a NAS type of OS? what i mean is, opposed to Windows with many tasks running, shouldnt running NAS be on the light side of hardware usage?

[SJLPHI]

It's not really the OS that eats up power, it's the machine itself usually. Older machines are less power efficient. For example, my Lenovo W530 eats up ~130W on idle and 230W at full strength whereas my P51 eats up 65W on IDLE and 170W at full strength. They are both laptops. A typical 2018 desktop draws ~200W on idle and >400 at full strength. If you are talking about 2008 machines, I wouldn't be surprised if they idle at above 200W.

 

Desktops are inherently less power efficient and you can remove things like the GPU and the sound card but not a thing you can really do about it software wise.