What to do with your old computer/laptop

With the fast pace of technology advancement nowadays, I'm pretty sure a lot of people keep changing devices at least once in 2-4 years, just like me.

Because of this, you may have few unused old devices that you don't know what to do with.  Sounds familiar?

Here are few ideas what to do with your old devices or computers:

1. Home Server
You can make your old computer to be your data storage at home.

2. Give to Low Usage User
Like my dad. He has been so many years never use computer. And I have an old laptop that I used since year 2007-2011. It's still usable except the spoilt battery. It was his idea to bring back my old laptop, for him to use. I thought why not? He can make use of it (even only for games or basic word processing) back at home.

3. Donate to schools or charities
Okay, I don't know which charity organization or school that want to take old used laptop or computer here in Singapore. But, back in my country Indonesia, there are a lot of public schools that have very minimum computing equipment. They will be happy to receive such generous donation.

There is this free tuition for Indonesian worker in Singapore. They are looking for laptop donations to be lend to the students. They will use it to do practices at home for certain period. If you want to know more, click here.

4. Salvage
If you think you can use some of the spare parts, take it. Maybe you can use the internal hard disk? Just buy a case for the hard disk and you have spare external hard disk. You can scrap the rest (see point 5).


5. Scrap it
Near my office there is one scrap shop that accepts metal stuffs. My office has been scraping old laptops and servers there. We use the money to buy snacks for regular company gathering.

6. Trade-in
I like this idea to trade-in my old laptop and get new one with cheaper price. With PC Dreams, you can get $50-S100 for Intel Atom, up to $350-$1000 for Intel i7. You can get the used laptop trade-in guide here. Sometimes Toshiba, HP and other IT vendors have trade-in programs too during IT shows.