Too good to throw away

[DerbyBorn]

Having decided out desktop is no longer needed and it wasn't worth passing on, I decided that the case would take up less room in the bin if I stripped the innards out and flattened it..........

I was impressed by the standardisation that must have been agreed so that components could easily be fitted and added with just a few screws.

The motherboard (ASUS) - well, I can't bring myself to throw this away. The tiny tracks on the circuit board - the standardised sockets - the lever operated socket for the processor. All amazing works of mass production.

The Hard Disk drive. I don't think I have ever seen such a wonderful peice of precision engineering - all for a very low cost.

Next to appreciate on its way to the bin will be the CD drive.

The power supply has gone on e-bay as it was fairly new.Again - impressive in the way that so many standard voltages and plugs are agreed upon.

Should I seek help?

[soup]

Nope, no need, there are a few that see the beauty in old PC parts.

Perhaps making the wife new shoes.

[Davey]

I thought up to this point that you were referring to the top of a desk, and was wondering why you would put its case in a bin.

[GB]

What have you done to disable it?

[Jonno]

DerbyBorn scribbled

Rather than bin so much, you could offer the comp to a charity that can reuse it -

/Computers.asp

[GB]

The real cost in doing that is the time to wipe the hard disk to a really good standard. It's far easier just to hit it hard with a big hammer.

Even an old PC may be able to run a lightweight OS. RemixOS is a version of Android that may be interesting.

Very new, so I guess the alpha means you would be testing it.

[GB]

The official release is out:

[Muddymike]

Having decided out desktop is no longer needed and it wasn't worth passing

I did the opposite. I found the case of my old desktop PC was made of heavy enough gauge steel to use for fabricating a repair panel for my Land Rover foot well. It folded and welded nicely:-)

Mike

[Huge]

Or run DBAN on it.

[Jonno]

GB scribbled

A load of bollocks. There are plenty of programs that can be used to wipe a hard drive, for free - Crap Cleaner for instance. And exactly how many people get a hard drive in the hope of obtaining the secrets of some unknown previous user. It's yet another myth probably coming from Seagate, who's drives were known to spontaneously fuckup if there was a D in the day.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , DerbyBorn escribió:

Not as someone who appreciates good engineering, no.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Huge escribió:

Takes too long. A linux boot CD and

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4M

is how I do it.

Or when I was on La Palma, playing 'toss the rock' with it. Outside. It was strangely satisfying smashing up a drive that had actually dared to fail on me.

[pamela]

They're quite stylish actually. I hope they have twinkling LEDs. :-)

[F Murtz]

Pull the hard drive to bits, it has a super dooper magnet in it.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

If it is ok stick it on Ebay. Someone will buy it.

[Bob Eager]

Well, some of them do.

[harry]

I once took a printer to bits. It was extraordinarily well made.

[DerbyBorn]

Got it out. The case of the hard drive was also beautifully made.

[rick]

No ... but you need to get out more

BTW .. what interconnects wonderfully took a long time to evolve .... I have printers with Centronics parallel port .... DB15 serial port .... USB .... Ethernet

There you go 4 different types of plugs and cables - just for a printer

[Tim Streater]

Two. USB and ethernet are all you need.