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

slackerDude · 08-18-2021, 02:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by astrogeek

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.

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.

slackerDude · 08-18-2021, 02:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by !!!

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 to deal with.

To expand on my CL idea, you can specify in your CL etc. 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 computer; you could narrow this down to slackers!

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..

enorbet · 08-18-2021, 03:54 PM

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?

FTIO · 08-18-2021, 09:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by slackerDude

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.

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).

slackerDude · 08-18-2021, 09:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by FTIO

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.

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.

Gnisho · 08-18-2021, 09:32 PM

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

thirdm · 08-20-2021, 08:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gnisho

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.