Finding a Home for Old Computers

washingtonpost.com ^ | Sunday, January 2, 2005 | Mike Musgrove

[crushelits]

If getting rid of clutter happens to be one of your New Year's resolutions, nothing will clear up a few cubic feet of space like getting an old computer, monitor or printer out the door.

In most cases, selling that antique hardware to a friend, co-worker or eBay user won't be an option computers lose their value faster than almost any other manufactured product in history. Just tossing them in the trash isn't a good idea either: Most computing gear contains such toxic components as lead, mercury and cadmium.

Instead, your options probably fall into the same two categories as a lot of other household junk: recycling or disposal.

The simplest choice is one of the computer-recycling programs that many PC vendors run. Gateway (www.gateway.tradeups.com), Hewlett-Packard (www.hp.com/recycle) and Dell (www.dell.com/recycle) all accept defunct computers regardless of brand. Just fill out an online form, pay a processing fee (usually $15 to $35) and pack up the old equipment. A shipper will show up at your door a few days later to whisk it away. In some cases, you can get a rebate toward the purchase of a new machine.

Equipment taken in through such recycling programs will be shipped to facilities built for breaking computers back down to their basic elements. Plastic, glass, steel, aluminum, copper, gold and silver -- all found inside desktops and laptops -- can be recovered and reused; the toxic leftovers will be safely disposed of.

[dennisw]

gwscan is a fast all purpose hard drive wiper. Works on just about all drives. It's at the Gateway website under downloads

[rwfromkansas]

Or.....and you won't have to pay shipping for this method...join a Freecycle group, offer your computer, and somebody who needs one will respond to your offer and come pick it up.

http://www.freecycle.org

[HP8753]

Everytime I get a new computer,I pawn the old one off on my brother-in-law.
He welcomes the "upgrade" and puts his "old one" in his basement.

Last time I looked....

He had a 286,386,486,486 souped up with Pentium Overdrive,and a 166 Mhz Pentium down there.

[kylaka]

There are a good number of programs out there that can do that. I use File Scavenger, which only recovers NTFS formatted drives, but there are others that also do FAT.

In most cases that I've used it, data recovery was complete and reliable. In one instance, the reliability of the data was spotty, and had to be verified. Recovery is easy, with a small learning curve, and takes a couple hours for a 250 Gig drive.

[general_re]

High-level formatting (what you get when you type format c:, for example) can be undone in software - that's easy to overcome. Low-level formatting (overwriting the drive with all zeros or some such) demands a bit more work, but recovering information from it is quite doable. You need an electron microscope and a good long time to work on it, but it can be done ;)

[kylaka]

A fender press forms car fenders. I can assure you, that a hood or door press will work just as well.

[Graybeard58]

I over heard a friend talking to his elderly mother after Church recently. She was concerned that her comp. might get a virus. he told her it wasn't possible because it wasn't online and she's the only one that's on it. She said, oh no, your father uses it too.

[A CA Guy]

fdisk

Look it up on the net.

[advance_copy]

If you're extra paranoid concerned - the NSA or CIA may want to see what you've been up to, for example

Are you kidding? The CIA and NSA already know what you've been up to, and we they are starting to get a little annoyed.

[Tristram Shandy]

This program's easy to use and gives you the option of writing over the drive with far more than one set of '0's.

Now, who can recommend a good (and free) encryption program? I've been using this one. Are there better ones?

[MississippiMan]

Out of curiosity, how do you recover data from a reformatted drive?

If you know how, you can do it manually with something as simple as Norton's old DISKEDIT.EXE DOS utility. Of course, this will turn into a VERY time consuming process very quickly. So from a practical perspective, you'd want to use recovery software designed to automate the task. I do digital forensics work and have a number of different forensic packages I work with.

MM

[general_re]

What is it you want to encrypt?

[Rightone]

Sledgehammer. 10 times. No information can be recovered.

Ever.

[CurlyDave]

But how to wipe the hard drive clean?

I take the hard drive out & smash it with a BIG hammer. You must smash the platter inside the metal case, so be sure to do a good job.

This is safer than any amount of reformatting. They will recycle the computer without the hard drive inside it.

[Tuscaloosa Goldfinch]

Then I have a question for you. I run Spybot on both my computers, and the desktop keeps showing 5 entries of DSO Exploit. I can run the program, choose to remove the DSO Exploit, run the program again, and they still show up. I DON'T want to reformat my hard drive -- how can I clean DSO off my machine?

[Tristram Shandy]

What is it you want to encrypt?

My Raquel Darrien collection, of course. (Do you leave yours unencrypted?) And some financial stuff. Files, not drives.

[BobS]

"But how to wipe the hard drive clean?

fdisk and destroy the partitions. Create a new one and while formatting, shut the machine off. There are low-level recovery programs that can get somebody back, but not well known. You will be safe.

[general_re]

Okay. Well, if you want, Windows 2000 and XP Pro both have encrypting filesystems built right in. Totally transparent and pretty secure. Otherwise, PGP 8 is still around and is the de facto standard - it's free for personal use.

[MarkL]

But how to wipe the hard drive clean?

You can go to the Active@ web site and download their free utility that will overwrite all the data on the drive. This should be OK for most people. However, if you've got really sensative data that you need to be sure can NOT be recovered, they've got a commercial product that conforms to DOD requirements.

Mark

[MarkL]

There are plenty of disk wiping programs out there that will clean disks beyond the ability of virtually anyone to read. If you're extra paranoid concerned - the NSA or CIA may want to see what you've been up to, for example - then you can always pull the drive out and physically destroy it

I've had certain government agencies as clients, and they wanted some hard drives replaced under warranty, and I had to explain to them that if they wanted the drives replaced under warranty, the drives had to be shipped back to the manufacturer.

The way they "wiped" the drives was putting them through a metal shredder! It's hard to recover data from 1/2" square shards of metal!

Mark