I have two laptops here that the wife needs out of the house. Both Amazon and Best Buy have a trade-in program, but neither of them qualify for it. I’m hesitant to put them on craigslist or anything, because I just don’t want to deal with wiping the hard drive, etc. Does anyone have any suggestions for what to do with them? Donating them would be alright, if I could trust the recipient to clean/wipe them, but how likely is that?
Depending on the model, it’s fairly easy to remove the hard drives.
Rather than wiping them just take them out. Replacements are cheap for older drives so if you give them away it could be worth it to buy a recon. HD.
Even surprisingly ancient laptops seem to sell OK on eBay - I guess there’s always someone out there who either wants them for spares, or wants a self-contained, compact, simple computer for some Linux project or other. Wiping the hard drive is usually pretty simple (or it can just be pulled and the machine sold without it.
If you don’t have the spare time to sell them this way yourself, do you have a friend you could trust to do it (and split the money)?
Interesting. So I just took them out. Should I put the enclosure back in, or are those standard when you buy a new drive? (I’m assuming the metal encasement around the internal drive is an enclosure. They’re each different for each laptop.)
Definitely put the enclosure back. Screws and all. Which means you should put the HD back since some screws will go into it! Each model laptop’s enclosure is fairly unique. So getting a replacement can be a pain, cost more money than it should, or be just impossible.
Just wipe the stupid HD and forget about doing anything else to it.
If you do sell on eBay/Craigslist, be warned that there are scammers who will offer more money than it’s worth, want you to ship it overseas, take a money order and all that nonsense. Laptop listings attract these jerks.
Maybe rethink wiping the hard drives; it’s super super easy on a lot of laptops.
Case in point: about a year ago, I felt like replaying Morrowind and a lot of the (massive, spectacular) mods that have been written for it. I dragged an old, creaky Toshiba laptop out of mothballs, figuring if I wiped it clean of everything but Morrowind, it could probably run it satisfactorily.
I was delighted to find that this laptop, and I gather quite a few others, no longer has a recovery disk - there’s now a hidden partition on the hard drive that functions as a built-in recovery disk. Wiping consisted of answering “Yes, I’m sure. Yes, I’m sure. YES I’M SURE” a few times, then walking away for 20-30 minutes. When I got back, there was a squeaky new laptop with a freshly reloaded copy of Windows 7 Home Edition waiting for me.
If and when I decide to sell that lappy or give it away, I fully plan to do that again.
if it runs windows 7 i wouldn’t call it a particularly old laptop… I was thinking along the lines of windows 95, or 98SE at best.
Not certain why the wife would need them out of the house,OP if they are laptops. Are they taking up too much room?
If you have some relatives who aren’t doing well financially, I would wipe the hard drives and give them to those individuals. While many of us have several or more laptops, we often forget that some people don’t even have a computer.
Clean them up, wipe the hard drives and give them to a relative. That way you don’t need to worry as much about ID fraud and they’ll get a relatively nice computer for free. A win for everybody.
Yeah, don’t leave out the hard drive. It significantly lowers the amount you can get for the laptop, more than just the cost of replacing it. I could have gotten my current used laptop for half the price without a hard drive or hard drive caddy. (I’ve had bad luck with taking apart laptops before and did not want to mess with it.) You’d be even better off to wipe the hard drive and then restore it to factory settings, if you can. People would much rather buy a laptop that they can just use.
As for how to get rid of it–eBay seems to do pretty well, even for first time sellers. At least, I did not find that big a price difference between people with a lot of feedback and without.
Plus, with eBay, you don’t have to worry about the scam ftg mentions, as it’s completely against the rules for anyone to try to contact you for payment outside of eBay. Furthermore, there shouldn’t be any way for them to do so, since eBay will not give out your email address. (To communicate, you send messages through eBay which are then sent to your email.)
OK yeah, that’s ancient. 
At that point, you’re talking about a laptop with severely limited utility in the modern world. No USB ports + no wireless capability = paperweight. (And a heavy one at that!)
If you just want them gone, stores like Office Max and Staples will take them off your hands for recycling. You won’t get any money and they’ll try to sell you a hard drive wiping for $29.95.
Goodwill recycles computer; they have a program with Dell. No charge.
I’d open the laptop and remove the hard drive before you drop it off. It doesn’t matter if you break anything getting it out: Dell is just using it for parts, anyway. The hard drives don’t take up much space, or you can open them up and smash the disk: the shards can be recycled.
I do not think the hard drive is actually “wiped” by doing this. If I am not mistaken, all that happens is that the main partition is reformatted and and the original image of the operating system is copied to it. Much of the data is still on the disk and can be reassembled by someone with modest skills. Now for 99% of the people you might sell it too, this is likely sufficient. Truly “wiping” a hard disk involves overwriting everything on the disk with random 1s and 0s. This can take a few hours. Some folks seem to think that you need more than one pass, but unless you are trying to hide shockingly deviant behavior that threatens national security, I would not bother. If you want to go this route, it is not difficult. Just download CCleaner and use the disk wipe tool, then restore the os from the hidden partition.
It is possible that some of these restore procedures do include real wiping, but unless they explicitly say so, I would assume they do not.
Yep. Lots of juicy personal information is recoverable unless you take pains to cover it up. And even then, I’m not sure where the limit of recoverability is short of physical destruction.
I’ve got a laptop carcass that suffered some physical trauma. I’m wondering if it’s even worth my time to do anything other than trash the remains.