[Advice / Suggestions / Free Hardware] What to do with older machines
 

I spent ~$1K in 2018 to build some new desktops for my wife's classroom - her old WinXP P4s were SO old, no recent build of either Firefox or Chrome would run on them, and the educational software she used needed a somewhat recent build.

So, I bought a bunch of Intel DH61 boards (DH61BE, DH61CR, etc) off ebay. Also bought some cheap Celerons (G645/G870/G640/G550/G540) and 2 GB DDR3 for each as well as new EVGA power supplies for most, and used 250 GB hard drives and new (used) cases for most of them. Enough to build 9 or 10 desktops, IIRC (I had enough spare parts to put together a couple more) - 12 machines total. I installed whatever Slackware was current at the time - 14.2, IIRC, but may have been 14.1. That was plenty to run chrome / KDE auto-login (these are 1st graders, we don't need userids / passwords to confuse them), etc.

Then, we got 4 all-in-one 24" i5-3470 machines from another classroom, so 4 of mine were put in storage (aka into the garage) - these machines have tiny 14" or 17" monitors, so 24" was a huge improvement.

Now, after 1.5 years of Covid and the school having bought a bunch of chromebooks, and social distancing required in the classroom (no politics here, please), there's no room for any of the machines, and most likely, they will never go back, as the students are now getting used to chromebooks, the school IT group is managing them with badge-based login, etc.

So, any ideas what to do? I know, donate, etc - but where? I'm in the Bay Area (CA), if it helps. I'd prefer to avoid recycling / e-wasting.

I know the machines are somewhat older, but Slackware people are great at using older hardware, and I've found the Intel boards to be solid. Can use up to 3570k/3770k with Bios upgrades (one such is running our fileserver Slack box, another our HTPC, another is running a family member's desktop machine). My kids are happy with laptops, so building each of them a machine is not really going to happen - they have the HTPC for general stuff as well.

I'm not tied to any one donation / disposal method. If anyone needs a box or 2 or 10 for some kind of valid use other than "I'm going to re-sell them on ebay", and you're willing to pay shipping, sounds good. If you can provide a donation receipt for tax purposes, even better. Heck, if you want to re-sell on ebay and give me some %age of profit, I'm in for that too - I don't have the time to handle all that and I wouldn't mind getting a few $$ back..

The most limited resource is DDR3 - I'm short one stick that I borrowed for home use (one stick died somewhere along the way), so one machine has no RAM. Other than that, I have some spare parts for everything else - way more than I'll ever need for personal use.

Just to be clear: if this helps you upgrade your current machine to something newer, or provides you with a 2nd "playing around" machine, that's fine too. I'm not insisting on charitable usage - I just don't want to have to e-waste everything. "Will be used" is a higher priority right now than "will get a tax receipt" or "will get me some $$".

Any input?
To summarize:
12 of: DH61 boards / Celeron 2-core CPU / 2 GB DDR3 (1 or 2 may be older DDR2-based 64-bit CPUs, I forget exactly)
-newish power supply (400W or 600W)
-some mini some tower cases
-250 GB HD
-keyboard, mouse, ~14" VGA monitors (mostly, 1 or 2 are 17", IIRC).

How about Inner City Schools, usually hard up for cash, (especially over here in the UK), or Charity/Goodwill shops, local Old Folks Homes, Community Centres, just some thoughts. :)

I think you said you're willing to give them away. If so, just post in the free section on Craigslist and you'll get a zillion replies!

Put them in a room and use them for one or more BOINC projects.

I'd say it depends on how much you value your time.

I'd recommend:

• I or 2 boxes as a firewall - console only. Maybe even BSD.
• PXE server(s)
• Backup server(s)
• Junk the junk.

Debian as an OS, or something that backports security fixes to old programs, like happens in some RH versions. Not Fedora, which never seems to get past Beta. But the bright guys in the computer class could configure these.

Thanks. Schools want somewhat newer hardware (even the i5-3470s were too old to be acceptable, according to their "stuff we will accept as donations" list) - the 1st graders didn't care, but I can see that if you're trying to run a recent version of Win10 + Photoshop, for example, a dual-core G645 with 2GB and integrated graphics isn't going to cut it.

Goodwill I had thought of, will see if they're interested. Not sure if they want a Windows license with it (these don't have such).

I hadn't though of seniors homes, but again, no windows licenses - not sure how much Linux savvy is out there. Or how much disappointment there will be when they can't download / play candy crush (my mother-in-law in her late 60s plays this all the time).

I ran F@H (Folding at Home) on my gtx 970 + rtx 2060s for nearly a year during covid - the spike in electrical bills (probably also due to covid / being at home) was so high that I can't imagine trying anything like that again. Plus, no spare room - houses are relatively small in CA.

Edit: plus, my ryzen 1700 daily driver (8 core / 16 thread) box + GTX 960 would probably contribute as much to BOINC as all of these put together (16 newer cores/threads vs 24 older cores) and for a LOT less power draw.

Thanks. I have a 3570K file server / Plex server, which has an added PCIe dual-GB ethernet card. So if I felt like it, I could run some kind of firewall / filtering on there. I don't do much fancy stuff and just leave the default firewall on at full these days. After getting port scanned 100+/hour when leaving ports open, I'm done with that.

I have ANOTHER 3570K as a "junk / play around" machine that runs an unlicensed copy of win10 / whatever I feel like.

This is me, more or less, "junking the junk" but feeling environmental guilt about it :-)

Yeah, this is probably what will end up happening, after checking out goodwill or maybe a local church or such.

I'm sure they'll be useful to someone, I'm running Slackware64-current on an old P4 system (albeit with 3GB RAM) and it's surprisingly usable, even Firefox runs tolerably. I can't take any of the systems on offer though, it wouldn't be worth flying them across the Atlantic. :)

This or a tor obfsproxy relay which are also needed. And these use little bandwidth.

My i5-3570K server with 8 GB could probably handle this, if I was so inclined - my wife is a government employee (teacher). Association with some of the less-pleasant Tor content is probably not a good idea if some parent ever decided to dig. As well, I access my employer from home, and again, I'm not sure I want that headache.

Agreed - these systems run Slackware 14.x just fine - hence my thought to ask in the Slackware group if anyone needed anything :-)

I'll probably end up keeping a couple of the DH61 boards as spares, a couple of the faster chips, and use a bunch of the DDR3 to beef up existing machines, etc.

If you can pass them along to someone who will make use of them then good for you and good for them!

I have gotten most of my computing gear for the past 20 years from a couple of small thrift stores. But they really just passed it through to me because I asked, they did not put it on their shelves for sale. Before I had asked and made arrangements to take it they refused such donations and sent any that were dropped off on to the landfill to become waste in more than one sense. So be sure to ask before donating - Goodwill for example has an agreement with Dell to NOT resell most donated computer gear, and others have an irrational fear that reselling is some sort of copyright violation.

Irrelevant political discussion aside, picture yourself a digital "Noah". Assure they are bootable and archive whatever you judge to be most useful source code and digital documents to their drives, then load them on the ark (stack them in a safe place). In any possible worst case near future that may include loss of our technology infrastructure, they may become very valuable as repositories of and access to knowledge that is suddenly unavailable elsewhere... and if that doesn't happen, toss them out a few years from now instead of today.

Get a free PC for trying slackware
 

I see you want them to go towards supporting slackware users.

Goodwill might just recycle them. Non-mainstream-M$ might be too confusing for churches/charities/etc to deal with.

To expand on my CL idea, you can specify in your CL (nextdoor etc local) ad that they run slackware and you'd like a new home where Slackware would be used: a new slackware user, a current slack user, or even friends / family of a current slacker.

Actually, anyone anywhere could do this with their spare PCs! (If you don't have time to help a beginner, I would love to fill in my idle retirement time guiding a beginner. Phone because I talk a lot better than I write, lol)

You'd be amazed at the number of people who would like a free (old) computer; you could narrow your recipient down to slackers!

This is a great suggestion if we had plenty of such storage space - but they're currently stacked to the rafters and impinging on normal garage usage. My wife will throw them in the dump herself before she lets me keep / store them somewhere. Plus, I don't have the time.

Sure, sounds great - but I don't have the time to support anyone with Slack. You want to do it? You near Silicon Valley at all? I'd be willing to drive a few hours to deliver..

Bill Gates/Microsoft Progression -
"No PC should ever need more than 1MB RAM"
"XP-64 cannot and will not support more than 4GB RAM"
"Win 11 requires a minimum of 4GB Ram"

No wonder hardware manufacturers love MS... Institutionalized planned obsolescence! Combine that with software obsolescence eg: changing word processing and backup formats to incompatible.. and what a racket! I doubt it is likely but wouldn't it be cool if MS was engineering their own demise? FWIW I have an ancient Celeron II machine with 512MB Ram that isn't snappy at everything but runs Slackware 14.2 at respectable (certainly not painful) performance once it boots up. It does help having a decent standalone GPU to share some of the load, but still it's 17 years old! Isn't that like 170 in PC Years? ;)

That's really strange. I'd say you've got something not setup correctly.

My old system (I build all my own so that I know *exactly* what is in them from the stand-off screws to the rest of the hardware and such) was going on ten years, I believe. Things on the MOBO were starting to go wonky - USB ports not working anymore, and other things making it not safe to remain my 'main use' system anymore.

I made it exclusively one of my BOINC Rosetta@Home crunchers. When I used this box as my main use system, Slackware 14.2 x86_64, my average electric bill now, during the summer with the window unit A/C inside this *OLD*, leaky trailer, is $90-$100/mo. In early spring and fall, when I can open the windows for a month or two and not use A/C or heating, the bill drops to around $50/mo.

The past two months, with my new system being my 'main-use' system (Ryzen 7 3700X, 16GB RAM, MEG X570 UNIFY MOBO, Sound Blaster Audigy Rx, GeForce GTX 960), *and* the old system, both running BOINC Rosetta@Home (the old system using 6 of the 8 cores, the new system using 8 of the 16, both constantly 24/7), my latest bill is $92. I live on a disability check, so it takes a little bit of juggling of things to be able to afford this bill, but it's worth the little bit of trouble (like most of the time living like a mushroom, etc, lol).

Ever looked at CA electricity prices? When you get to tier 3, it's $0.33/kWh. A 2060s, 970, and for a while a 3600X, 3570K and 1700 and even a 950 for a bit. That easily adds 1kWh / hr in aggregate. Times 24 * 0.33 = ~$8/day. Times 365. Yeah, maybe not quite $2400, but it was at least $500 more than expected for our year-end true-up due to having solar panels.

Might be worth looking into Freegeek or Freecycle, if there's anyone local to you for them.

Yeah, this seems the best bet. Or if not official Freegeek then is there a local group doing anything like that, maybe with a Free Software bent, as in a group that dedicates itself to spreading the word about Free Software while trying to make a dent in the digital divide or the problem of ewaste? Not sure if they're still operating, but there was a group like that in Boston run by someone with pretty close ties to FSF and a friend who'd run a similar program in Spain. They ran it as low cost training where when you finished the program, which involved installing Linux on the machine and learning some basics about the hardware, you got to keep the machine. They would use very old stuff, whatever businesses or schools were discarding.

At one point I thought I saw an individual or two trying to do something like this via Craiglist too, but on a very small scale. It seemed like he'd scavenge, spruce up and install a well known distro and resell a little above cost. Plainly he wanted to spread use of GNU+Linux more than to make a buck.

Or is there a local maker space that might use some for industrial control or whatever.