Computer Recycling

Past Isopropyl is a great way to clean up a lot of plastic, but I found that while it’s helpful for removing grime, caked on stickers (Goo Gone), and other crud, it doesn’t always leave a nice finish. A few years back a volunteer at the Computer Recycling Project mentioned interning at a small computer store where they used Mr. Clean Magic Erasers to clean-up the top of ThinkPads. True to what he said, Mr. Clean Magic Erasers do seem to be a pretty good job on the top of ThinkPads. ...

Note: This is an older post, reposted from the old web site. The project has since mostly switched to Linux Mint XFCE versions 21.3 (Virginia) and 22.1 (Xia). We still have Xubuntu 24.04.2 on our PXE server, but only install it on request. Our checklist has evolved and we’ve separated some steps into other checklists. See my github repositories for more info. Workstation class hardware at a deeply discounted price Every now and then the Computer Recycling Project at The Working Centre gets a really interesting piece of hardware donated. As a not-for-profit project, most of our equipment is aimed at people who are lower income. This generally translates into lower prices, even for some equipment others would list for a lot more. But that doesn’t mean the project just wipes the machines, installs Linux, and dumps the equipment on a sales shelf… often equipment requires a little, or a lot more work. ...

About the script I wrote the hardware.sh BASH script to make it a bit simpler for volunteers at The Working Centre’s Computer Recycling Project to figure out what hardware was in a computer. For more than a dozen years we’ve been asking volunteers to gather information from the BIOS, or using phoronix-test-suite under our PXE booted Debian Live environment. Volunteers would write the information on quarter page-sized sheets we would attach to each computer. While this was a useful function to help volunteers get to know hardware in a computer, there were a few problems with this method: ...