What should I do with my old laptop?

In My Humble Opinion
1

The hard drive in my 5-year old iBook G4 has apparently peed it’s pants.

The dude at the “Genius Bar” quoted $200 to replace it, but a baseline Macbook is $1000 so I think I am just going to get a new one. What can I do with the old one?

The data on it is backed up, but still exists on the hard drive (corrupted though it may be). Can I remove the hard drive myself and donate/sell the rest? Should I take up skeet shooting with the hard drive?

I am not super computer savvy - the most complex thing I have attempted on it (successfully) was to increase its RAM and upgrade the OS, but am reasonably mechanically proficient with proper direction.

Any advice would be great.

2

You should be able to remove the hard disk fairly easily and sell the rest on eBay or give it away or Craigslist or something - that’s a far more likely avenue for disposal than donation, actually.

Then, take a ball peen hammer and break the disk into a million little pieces.

3

Hammer to the hard drive works wonders.

4

Selling the iBook G4 on eBay sans hard drive is a good idea. Laptops in general seem to have a really good resale value there.

Also, you may want to consider replacing the hard drive yourself. There are step by step instructions on how to do so at this site. It does seem to be a fairly arduous task, but it’s an option. iBook hard drives look to be starting at around $50 for a 160gb drive on Ebay. I wouldn’t try this unless you’re confident that you know what you’re doing or have a family/friend that’s adept at fixing electronics. I tried taking apart a laptop once that was already fried, and was never able to get it back together in one piece.

Honestly, now that I think about it, you’d have to go through the same steps to just remove the hard drive. If there is no sensitive data on the disk, I’d be half tempted to throw it on Ebay with the disclaimer that the hard drive is shot, and let them deal with replacing it.

5

Thanks for the advice. TheScogg - me and my wife have our resumes on there as well as personal photos and the like. I think removal of the hard drive is probably the best bet.

I’ll look into instructions on removal and then creative ways to destroy the hard drive.

6

Boat anchor.

7

I usually just drill a couple holes through it or cut it in half with a sawzall. Assuming the Military doesn’t have any reason to take a look at the contents, anything you can do to physically destroy the drive should be perfectly secure. OTOH if it’s full of Russian military secrets a couple of passes with a chop saw might not do the trick.