Me personally, I will try to sell or give it away to family or friends, but if nobody wants it, then I keep some parts and throw the rest in the trash.

After you get a new whatever, what do you do with the old one?

Keep it
sell it
donate it
keep spare parts or
trash it

Other

I either donate them (rarely--I tend to use stuff, including vehicles, until the wheels fall off) or find some way to recycle them safely. (If the wheels fall off, I try to salvage anything that might be useful, such as HDDs, for spare parts.) Needless to say, I shred the HDDs if I donate them.

In these parts, Good Will regularly runs recycling drives and will take old electronics. Just throwing them in the trash is not really a good idea; electronics are full of heavy metals and other hazardous substances.

I remember hearing on the news they were thinking of passing a law to recycle electronics because landfills are getting to extreme with electronics and such.

good reply frank

I'm the same as Frank on this only I tend to keep what most would consider recyclable for projects galore : : :
http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/electricCircuits/ we've also used old cases for sk8 ramps and parts make good erector set replacements + + + . . .
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ld-4175486029/
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...mpster-divers/
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ml#post4854394

best wishes and have fun.

I usually keep the memory modules, HDDs, cables and dvd drives.

Thanks jamison20000e for the reply

If it works, each options is ok but NOT trash it.
If it's not useful now, it could be useful between some months (or year)

SSseeerrrvvveeeeerrrrrsssss

Give them to Free Geek.

I use everything until it dies, and then it goes for recycling: putting electronics in general waste is (thankfully) illegal in Europe.

I, too, use things until they break. Then I'll either smash or write over the hard drives and then the machine to the local "tip" where they have an area for recycling electronics.

Still working:
Give them to a relative, for use in the office.

Not working or about to fail:
Take them apart and keep what still works, usually the CPU, RAM, and monitor. The rest is either trashed of recycled depending on what it is and the available services.

I've tried donating, but many agencies don't want them

BestBuy and others take any old electronics for recycling.

I give them to goodwill if they are usable. If they are not working I sell them to recycle places. The prices for recycle are 22 cents a pound. Not much but way better that throwing it in the trash, which is illegal in many areas.

Senior Center, poor kids, make a streaming radio player, make a streaming movie player,
carve up carcass and shelve . I have 2 working spare Athlon 64 3500+ 2.2GHz Socket AM2 CPUs
for when I find people like schizophrenia throwing their desktops in the dumpster.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d-deliver-174/

My oldest working media centers are my IBM M41 Desktop and IBM A22M Laptop.
They surf the web and print and yadda yadda yadda.

Being a desert creature we eat the marrow before throwing out the bones.

Let me ask, how old is useful? Does it depend on memory or something else?

I still have the first pentium I built, simply because I built it (finished on 9-11). When I was able to get free memory to max it out (256), I did, and considered making it into a Smoothwall, or some other firewall distro.
But at this point, when offered older pc's, I have accepted to bring back up my screw collection, after the container busted open in my truck. (cases have been reused or scrapped and motherboards will get recycled)
Kids like memory keychains and disc platter wind chimes and people are happy to see their data exposed that way.

If I can use them to learn something, I will. Currently though, I have bought and am using more the Raspberry PI's for that reason.