What Should You Do With an Old PC: E-Recycle or Refurbish?

20
Dec

Everyone and every business likely has at least one if not several old computers sitting around. What should you do with an old PC? Should you e-recycle or refurbish? You may think that Sadoff E-Recycling & Data Destruction is going to point you toward e-recycling, but in truth, that is not always the case.

When Should You Refurbish a PC?

This question has a lot of variables tied to it. One of the big ones that you have to answer though is what are you going to do with the computer after you refurbish it? If you have your own use for it, then don’t bother reading any further. You’ve answered your question already. Refurbish and reuse that computer in your business or home. Just make sure that if it is going to be used by anyone else in its new job, that you have a fresh data drive for it. More on that in a moment.

If you are planning to sell the computer after it is refurbished, then you have to understand the market and understand what you will have to put into it. Does it need new components? Does it need cleaning? Is it new enough to still be of value after you put work into it? If you are doing this yourself, you are going to have to do some research to come to the right conclusion.

If in the end, you decide not to refurbish, then you should definitely e-recycle that computer. By e-recycling the computer, you will ensure that no harm is done to the environment and you may still get some value out of the machine in the process.

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Can You Reuse the Hard Drive?

The nice thing about a PC is that most of the computer doesn’t store any data. You can give your motherboard, RAM, power supply, disc drive, and graphics card to the world’s best hacker and they aren’t going to be able to get anything out of the exchange. Leave your hard drive in there though, even for an amateur, and you are going to have a bad time,

We’ve written on this many times before, but even a simple hard drive format isn’t enough to wipe sensitive data from your drives, and often free software can recover most if not all of the data that you formatted.

You can take your drive to a data destruction facility like Sadoff, and use a data destruction method like overwriting that is non-destructive to the drive itself. Even that may not be the best option. In truth, we recommend complete physical destruction of the drive for the best security. This is the one component during a refurbishment that even if it is not broken, we recommend replacing entirely or selling without.

Where to Sell a Refurbished Computer

Selling will often become the issue. You can try eBay or Facebook marketplace or listing elsewhere on the Internet. However, it is often difficult to get good value out of an old computer. Sadoff may have another solution for you.

Sell Your Old Computers With Sadoff

At Sadoff, we can provide IT asset remarketing. This takes all the guesswork out of the equation and also allows you to get rid of old computers in bulk. This is a service we typically only extend to bulk amounts of computers from businesses. We will intake all of your computers, sort through them, and decide what computers are worth refurbishing and which aren’t. For those that aren’t, we will e-recycle. Those that are, we will refurbish and then sell for you. We can also donate them for you after refurbishment as well. You just have to sit back, relax, and let us worry about it.

Categorized in: E-Recycle, IT Equipment