Shameless Screenshots (very large image files.. NOT for dial-up)

[Aloone_Jonez]

Wow, I have better computers sitting in a pile ready to be thrown out. Also, I've never noticed the 60hz flicker. Everyone else does.

Don't throw them away give them to charity so some child in the 3rd world can watch as much porn as they can.

My old computer still serves me well. It's fine for the Internet and word processing. There's still plenty of disk space left on the old crappy hard drive and I rarely use all the RAM.

[Kintaro]

I don't see that donation bin sitting around. I've donated old computers before to a melbourne charity that puts debian on them (if they are super old) or ubuntu and puts them homeless shelters and such with internet access. Not the worst way to write a resume when one has little else left I imagine.

[Aloone_Jonez]

Plenty of charities which accept PC donations can be found using Google.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=old+computers+charity&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

[Kintaro]

In Australia we all go through so many computers it seems recycling is entirely about keeping them away from landfills. I think this has a lot to do that we are the kings of the world in terms of our trade position with a dollar that kicks ass relatively, since we are the only G20 nation that cares enough about its currency to raise rates. As far as keeping these systems out of landfills goes, I am doing exactly that. Because when I refined that search for Australia, I really couldn't find much other than recyclers. The absence of charity doesn't surprise me, because usually when I meet someone without a computer and I have seven spare ones they get given an old one pretty quickly. This is the Australian way. I imagine the recycler probably tries to hock the cables and such, but when its obselete it really is, and they probably just dump them in landfills anyway.

I don't see a big movement to send them to Africa or South America coming either. No boats tend to go in that direction, all the boats departing Australia are usually headed for Europe and China carrying coal. Which we use to buy too many damn computers.

The irony is that despite having the developed worlds worst Internet connection speeds, we probably have more processing power per head than anyone. Actually, my dad got his computer from free from work because they were going to throw it in the bin over a year ago and it has a dual core 3.2ghz Intel processor and 4 gigabytes of ram.

[Calum]

in your opinion is that good news or bad news, or neither?

I have wondered about this, we've reached the point now where there's going to be a huge ton of old but still functional computers lying around in every "West" country that nobody wants or needs to use. What's the solution i wonder? Melt them down for their constituent parts? Can you imagine a day when you buy recycled solder, and you can buy video cards made from 100% recycled materials...

btw, about Australia's recycling policy, what sort of situation is it at the moment? Ten years ago when i was there, there was an impressive amount of recycling going on amongst the general public (compared with in the UK at that time anyway), and yet i had heard that much (all?) of the stuff people had put in for recycling was just being stored because Australia didn't have facilities to recycle many of the materials. Do you happen to know if this is still the case, or if it ever was the case (i'm not sure where i even heard this, so it might not even be true).

[Aloone_Jonez]

Kintaro,
I wouldn't mind your dad's PC, it's much better than mine.

I don't see the point in having a really fast computer, my current main machine is a 2GHz single core AMD 64 processor, PC3200 1GB RAM, Sapphire Radeon X300SE graphics carge with 256MB RAM which I got for free from my brother. I'm happy with it and will probably not upgrade for a few years and when I do it'll be for free, the only thing I'd probably pay for is a solid state HD. The older machine described in my previous post was my main machine until the end of last year.

I don't play games or anything so buying a faster PC won't bring me any real benefits, a lot of the extra power will be sucked up by the latest version of Windows, so any PC is fine as long as it can cope with Google's latest 3D mapping web apps. I still don't even use the full power of my current PC - half of that 1GB RAM hardly ever gets used!

[Kintaro]

I am really not sure, but I've heard the same thing as you somewhere. I know that wherever there is the profit motive there is recycling. My family was in the automotive recycling business for years and that tended to sit in a balance of selling the parts of cars or having them melted down for scrap metal. When the price of steel shot up, we crushed a lot more cars. Computers don't really contain much of anything of value so they just sit around. Yet there is a bit of culture of recycling and people tend to like taking part.

I made a joke at the supermarket the other day, when I forgot to bring my reusable grocery bags that they can probably make 10,000 disposable bags with the same amount of energy as weaved cotton reusuable one. When it comes to climate change I think when ETS becomes more widespread recycling could be hit in the crossfire as wasteful of energy.

I hope my kids are digging up landfills in 2050 and using nanite replicators or whatever to turn them back into useful stuff.

As for motherboards and parts there are a lot of computer recycling businesses which come in handy in repairing old computers and upgrading them but as they become obselete so does the demand for the parts.

Kintaro,
I wouldn't mind your dad's PC, it's much better than mine.

I don't see the point in having a really fast computer, my current main machine is a 2GHz single core AMD 64 processor, PC3200 1GB RAM, Sapphire Radeon X300SE graphics carge with 256MB RAM which I got for free from my brother. I'm happy with it and will probably not upgrade for a few years and when I do it'll be for free, the only thing I'd probably pay for is a solid state HD. The older machine described in my previous post was my main machine until the end of last year.

I don't play games or anything so buying a faster PC won't bring me any real benefits, a lot of the extra power will be sucked up by the latest version of Windows, so any PC is fine as long as it can cope with Google's latest 3D mapping web apps. I still don't even use the full power of my current PC - half of that 1GB RAM hardly ever gets used!

Windows 7 seems a bit nicer than Vista on hardware requirements. Without games I've noticed many people use overpowered computers for very little.

[Calum]

Yet there is a bit of culture of recycling and people tend to like taking part.

this is nice to hear, in the UK it's still the mainstream attitude that recycling is for tree hugging alfalfa eaters, and that we'll only do it w the government forces us to (the main thing that seems to be fashionable at the moment is to treat recycling bins as normal bins, no idea what that's about, but it's the height of ignorance imho)

I hope my kids are digging up landfills in 2050 and using nanite replicators or whatever to turn them back into useful stuff.

i totally agree. :-)

[Kintaro]

[Kintaro]

I can post my screenshots in links.

[Refalm]

A simple desktop, the way I like it. Contains the bestest Gnome theme ever. Try finding shiki-colors.

[bedouin]

[hm_murdock]

Windows 7 seems a bit nicer than Vista on hardware requirements. Without games I've noticed many people use overpowered computers for very little.

Truth. I still use a 450MHz desktop and a 180MHz portable on daily bases.

Here's the screen from that 450.

[reactosguy]

Click image for full screen resolution. (1600x900)

[Refalm]

that's old school

I actually grabbed that page once and converted it to XHTML+CSS. That was before I realized that a forum portal was a much better idea.