Donating old PC's and Laptop

[Montello]

I have a couple of old all-in-one PCs and a laptop that I no longer need and are gathering dust.

Anyone know of a good way of donating these and what is the best / most secure was to delete the data from the hard drive before donating?

Edit: I'm using DBAN to erase them from a bootable USB

[Carlton-Browne]

DBAN works for HDDs but not SSDs so be careful with that.

https://dban.org/

It cannot detect or erase SSDs and does not provide a certificate of data removal for auditing purposes or regulatory compliance

[Montello]

DBAN works for HDDs but not SSDs so be careful with that.

https://dban.org/

Thanks, these are old machines with disks that turn.

[Mr Pointy]

Have you condsidered if they are really of any use anyway? They almost certainly cannot run Windows 11 so will soon be out of support although you might be able to completely wipe them & put some form of Linux on.

Who did you have in mind to donate them to?

[A440]

I've used freecycle in the past to donate old PC's. I either did a clean install of Windows or Linux Ubuntu. The people who collected were grateful to have a free admin machine :)

[Montello]

Have you condsidered if they are really of any use anyway? They almost certainly cannot run Windows 11 so will soon be out of support although you might be able to completely wipe them & put some form of Linux on.

Who did you have in mind to donate them to?

Any machine that is Intel i3 or above seems to be accepted by the recycling companies. These are i5.

I suspect the are recycled into developing nations.

[Carlton-Browne]

Have you condsidered if they are really of any use anyway? They almost certainly cannot run Windows 11 so will soon be out of support although you might be able to completely wipe them & put some form of Linux on.

Who did you have in mind to donate them to?

Windows 10 is currently forecast to be EOL in May 2025.

[W124]

Take a look online for your local rotary club, they frequently have connections to charities which send pcs to African schools.

[Mike2500]

Currys will accept and recycle/dispose of old laptops and possibly PCs


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[Filterlab]

Just remove the hard drives. Usually incredibly easy on almost any device.

[Kingstepper]

Just remove the hard drives. Usually incredibly easy on almost any device.

Not the case with Apple laptops and many others.

[Mr.D]

Just do a low level format of the drives .
If you are really worried there are various free apps that will write zeros to all the file positions on the drive and then format, realistically no one is going to try to read off the old data.

[Mr.D]

Most macs have encrypted drives at least for the last 5 years I believe, unless you turn it off.

[Montello]

Just do a low level format of the drives .
If you are really worried there are various free apps that will write zeros to all the file positions on the drive and then format, realistically no one is going to try to read off the old data.

I'm using DBAN to erase them from a bootable USB

I have just given them to a friend who will take them to work to recycle via their corporate recycling programme.

[Filterlab]

Not the case with Apple laptops and many others.

I repair Apple devices for a living. They're all very simple indeed.

[Kingstepper]

I repair Apple devices for a living. They're all very simple indeed.

Well aren’t the hard drives soldered on modern MacBooks?

[Filterlab]

Well aren’t the hard drives soldered on modern MacBooks?

On a handful of new models only, all the preceding ones are bus drives in one form or another.

But the ones with fixed drives have a secure reset option built into either System Preferences or Recovery Mode anyway; and as they're solid state only, once the bits are in the 'off' state (or zeroed), there's no magnetic trace.

One way or the other, it's very easy to remove the data from a Mac and most laptops, particularly older ones.

I do this gumph all day long; have done for 12 years now as a job, and 34 years as a hobbyist.

[Kingstepper]

On a handful of new models only, all the preceding ones are bus drives in one form or another.

But the ones with fixed drives have a secure reset option built into either System Preferences or Recovery Mode anyway; and as they're solid state only, once the bits are in the 'off' state (or zeroed), there's no magnetic trace.

One way or the other, it's very easy to remove the data from a Mac and most laptops, particularly older ones.

I do this gumph all day long; have done for 12 years now as a job, and 34 years as a hobbyist.

Yes, don't doubt that they can be reset.

[ChronoPantera]

On a handful of new models only, all the preceding ones are bus drives in one form or another.

But the ones with fixed drives have a secure reset option built into either System Preferences or Recovery Mode anyway; and as they're solid state only, once the bits are in the 'off' state (or zeroed), there's no magnetic trace.

One way or the other, it's very easy to remove the data from a Mac and most laptops, particularly older ones.

I do this gumph all day long; have done for 12 years now as a job, and 34 years as a hobbyist.

Please where abouts are you based? as I've got an old Macbook pro 17inch which needs a new battery fitting, as the old one only lasts around 1 hour.

(i'm not keen on the idea of posting it, as I don't think being thrown around in the back of a van is good for a laptop)

also i made the mistake of buying a windows 10 Dell laptop 18 months ago now, and the 'shut down' does not fully shut it down, so it flattens the battery on it's own by doing updates whilst switched off !! i've tried everything and it still does it...... very annoying - possibly you know how to sort this ?

Thanks

[Filterlab]

I'll PM you mate.