Out With The Old
Between the Shot Of Jaq listenership there is probably thousands of old tired computers sitting in our houses gathering dust. Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge explore what we can use these aging dinosaurs for and what challenges we face in revitalizing them.
Of course, we are the very start of the conversation! What do you think? What do you use your old computers for? Do you know some cool software tools that can make that old machine useful again? What challenges have you faced and how did you overcome them?
22 Comments to “Out With The Old”
Leave a Reply
I’ve got a rack mount S-100 bus Compupro 8/16 in my closet. It’s got an 8 inch floppy drive, 40MB hard drive, an 8085 AND an 8086, and a WY-50 terminal. Do you think it will run Ubuntu?
I can see why schools may not want old hardware. They usually have one (or one part time) over-worked IT person running around patching up what they already have. They don’t want 20 different odds and sods that some has to patch up “in his spare time”. They want a set of homogeneous systems they can manage with a minimum of effort.
Usually the best thing you can do with an old computer is to salvage parts out of it to build your new computer. That’s not practical for laptops, but building your own desktop is usually pretty easy.
I use an old PC for a home server but I’ve recently hit the capacity limit of IDE hard drives so have just purchased a shiny new TranquilPC system with SATA and much lower power consumption to replace it. This sadly means the current server will be added to the pile of unused boxen in my study.
Among them are an Amiga, several old desktop PCs, a 386 laptop, a 486 laptop (which I once managed to install Debian on but then couldn’t think of anything to use it for), a linutop, an original Nokia 770 internet tablet, a tux droid, awesome little “gumstix” embedded computers from a uni project, a load of PIC chips, I have a touchscreen conversion kit from China, a coin acceptor and several large drawers full of old PCI/ISA cards, HDDs, motherboards, CPUs, cables and goodness knows what else!
I can think of a million things to do with all of these components, but unfortunately working 12 hour days I find it impossible to find time sit down, let alone get down some geeky hacking!
I like the charity idea btw, but I’m sure it’s been done before and I’m not sure it really takes off at a large scale. The value of the equipment depreciates so quickly that it just isn’t worth the time of the people involved, unless they’re able to volunteer their time for nothing that is.
Playing devil’s advocate, why would someone buy a dodgy old beige PC from a charity shop when they can buy a cheap netbook?
I think sending old computer equipment off to the third world is a nice idea, but I’m not sure how successful it is on a practical level.
Having worked at a community college I can tell you that they don’t want your old kit. We were once given about 100 old Compaq PCs by a local company because it would have cost them to dispose of them. They sat at the back of our office for several months while we tried to figure out what to do with them. We even thought about building a Linux cluster but when we realised the entire cluster would be less powerful than the average computer the students were using and we calculated the power consumption, the boxen unfortunately ended up in a skip!
It really is a great shame the amount of computer equipment that’s lying around which still works as well as the day it was manufactured, but the world has moved on and left it behind!
The issue is why so much computer hardware is thrown out in the first place.
Until recently I was using a Compaq desktop with just 256Mb RAM that was getting on for 10 years old. It would still play DVDs full-screen and, by dual booting XP, it would also run MS Flight Simulator with nice smooth real-time movements.
It’s all too easy to convince yourself that you need the latest hardware, especially when all your friends have it. It’s much like the peer pressure to buy a new car when the one you’ve got actually suits you just fine.
The only reason I finally gave in and got some new kit is that I wanted to run VirtualBox to try out Linux distros, and 256Mb just isn’t enough for that. Have to admit it’s nice to have a shiny new laptop on my desk, but I bet I’ll still be using it 5 years from now.
Much the same principle applies to a lot of software. In my work I visit a lot of corporate sites where I would say the norm remains XP + Office 2003. It’s clear that a lot of the commercial world sees no benefit in upgrading just for the sake of it.
In the 80s and 90s, when software and hardware were immature, there were tangible benefits from trying to always have the latest. Now things are different. Processors and disks are already so fast that a 10-fold reduction in the time it takes many actions to complete is often indistinguishable.
Not totally true, there are plenty of things a decently powered newish machine are useful for. Personally I do quite a bit of graphics work in The GIMP/Photoshop, desktop publishing in Scribus, VirtualBox, video editing, often several of said tasks at the same time.
Whilst older hardware can run some of those things the amount of time I spend waiting for stuff to finish loading would be actively detrimental to the work I was doing. Once I’m in the zone creatively I want to get as much done as I can before my mood changes again.
Modern computers are MASSIVELY overpowered for what they are used for. Just take a look at your CPU graph, it will hover around 1% 99% of the time.
A lot of “old” computers are still perfectly usable, but planned obsolescence, fashion and windows rot has convinced people otherwise. For everything besides gaming and 3D media work, a pentium 3 era machine is perfectly adequate.
With a little trickery, you can complete all of your work on a pentium 1: http://kmandla.wordpress.com/
I’d say they’re massively overpowered for a lot of what most people use them for, but there’s plenty of us geeky folk that get a lot more bang for our buck.
I know I am grateful on a daily basis for the four cores and 4GB of RAM I have.
+1 for that. Compilation with 4 cores and bogloads of RAM is nicer than on 1 core and half a gig of RAM, especially with compile-on-save.
I meant to add that my primary computer at home, on the dining table, is a 5yo Dell Inspiron 6000 running the latest Ubuntu. I’ve upgraded the RAM and HDD recently (to 2Gb and 160Gb respectively) and it’s a fantastically usable computer for web and office stuff. It could be a bit snappier but it’s quite usable.
The other reason for keeping it is that it has a 1680×1050 15″ screen – finding resolutions that high these days is like looking for hens’ teeth made of gold too: very rare and quite pricey.
If only I could replace the entire mobo, video card, processors, memory and HDD with something more modern, then it’d absolutely fly!
You could link them up and make them into your own cloud desktop
In Ireland we have a group called Camera and they take in old pcs put linux on them and send them to Africa.
Yeah, my Dad’s been a Mac user for an awfully long time and he’s really disappointed that there’s nothing he can do with his old computers (old MacSEs, an LCIII and a 5500 or something, and more). Even the Apple clubs don’t want them. They still work for word processing and printing but they don’t have any network support (not easily) and so they’re essentially useless.
Such a pity, really. It’s not even enough for a little museum either.
What about plain old recycling? As you mentioned in the shot, many of these computers are so old as to be worthless at running even the most basic software by today’s standards (especially old ones don’t even have networking hardware). So why not recycle the constituent parts so they can be used in other products or computers?
OR you could donate them by going to freelinuxbox.org
Jamie’s Computer Club (run by the homeless charity The Society of St James) in Southampton disposes of unwanted computer equipment, but also uses some of the equipment to provide disadvantaged adults with training and qualifications, included work-based training schemes. They also sell reconditioned equipment to raise money for the charity.
http://www.jamiescomputerclub.org.uk
What I’ve done with two of my retired desktop machines is to install Linux on them, connect them to the internetz, install a distributed computing client on them and run them till they die.
It might take a long time and electricity isn’t cheap, but i still think it’s worth while.
I run Folding@Home or BOINC, depending on circumstances.
I don’t know what you guys are running, but it’s quie clear that ubuntu has become more crufty and bloated since I used to use it. I clocked down my processor, and still I’m usually running on betveen 1 and 10% and 140 mb of ram used, that’s for normal use. My 4 year old machine is still way better than I need it to be, just sad that the fan broke, and it’s probably cheaper to buy a new machine now than getting it repaired. I just don’t see what people are running on their machines that suck so much memory and processor power.
I think one point you miss in this episode is the fact, that if you give old computers to people who cannot afford new computers it doesn’t solve the problem of the cost of getting rid of the computer once it doesn’t work anymore. If you give a old machine to someone you pass on that burden along with it…
As I understand this is a huge problem in the third world because a lot of people think it’s a good thing to donate a old machine to people there and there they end up in huge dump grounds…
My old machines have hard drives secure wiped (or removed) then listed on freecycle.
Good point Navigium!
The problem of waste is much larger than the tech industry. It applies equally to all manufactured goods (furniture, plastics, buildings). It seems that the idea of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle often does the second two alright, but not the first. As others have pointed out, many people and business upgrade for almost every reason other than necessity. Modest hardware will run most applications well for much longer than people expect. So perhaps a component of this debate is better directed at software, which if was created or configured leaner, would allow older tech to last longer before becoming obsolete.
I fully recognize that this is putting off the general question to a degree, but longer life might translate to less production, which would mean less waste, right?
For the whole thing about the setting up a business, selling on old hardware, cannibalizing stuff to make new stuff … reminded me of a Cory Doctorow story – “Someone comes to town, someone leaves town” – worth a read
Giving old hardware away sure feels good but a PC older than say 5 years is essentially useless for anybody. Having it run a word processor and be able to print is not good enough nowadays, even for your mother. They want to browse, ’skype’, watch youtube and play Flash games. Essentially everything you would yourself minus the compiling part.
As for reusing the old hardware yourself: Everything that runs on such an old box does run on you new PC without a problem. Even better, faster and more energy efficient! At MOST one dedicated server machine in your house will be useful. Even on old hardware it can run anything you want simultaneously. Mail, firewall, webserver, backup, dns, etc etc.
If you really want to do good, please take 15 minutes and bring you old Pentium2 to the recycling instead of the trash.
Final remark: especially novice users, such as your -father-in-law-, need good reliable hardware. Not your 10 year old piece of crap that dies of interrupts when hooked to Fast Ethernet.
This kind of activity is done by a charity in Ireland Called Camara. They take in computers and put Linux on them. They then ship these PCs to Africa . Most importantly they send over Volunteers to educate and train the locals so that they can run and maintain these systems. They even create custom courses for using the machines.
You can learn more about all of the cool stuff they do at http://camara.ie/web/