I inherited the IT cache about a year ago
Have spent many hours sorting it, for the sheer satisfaction of keeping them out of the tip for another generation of use (what is that, about 3 months now? Maybe a year...?).

I Freecycled a lot although the hipster IT-wannabe insisted it was outdated and useless, and should be binned. What a waste! I met several WONDERFUL geeky, nerdy, IT types, from engineers to amazingly resourceful plain old handy techies, who have been happy to take this for useful purposes.

One pile of server equipment went to an engineer who gleefully rubbed his hands together and nearly cackled, "I can finish my home LAN!"

I have twice given piles of 512MB RAM-or-less Pentium PCs to a handicapped techie who volunteers with some area elementary schools. She puts them together, loads software, and deploys them in classrooms. She has request lists from the teachers, and fills a lot of them with our cast-offs.

A stack of old laptops went to a volunteer who refurbishes them, installs software, and puts them in villages when he goes on techie missions (I think I like that better than the religious ones).

I spent part of the last week sorting the cache of PDAs. Apparently they've been hoarded for a few years (an engineer helping me clear out stuff drily commented, "yeah, because they increase in value that way"). I had a workbench covered with obsolete equipment, and I enjoyed it. I'm data wiping and doing hard resets and testing, trying to ensure none of our data is recoverable before we eBay or Freecycle this stuff.

Oh, hipster techie wannabe? I did an easy "restore last backup" on his castoff pda, and got all of his data back. So now I've got to meet with his supervisor and report this, and remind them of proper procedure in Dept of Defense-level data wiping before releasing any equipment, just to convince them that they actually do need to send the equipment to me for proper processing and disposal. Bollocks.
( kila is reading clocks upside-down as usual, Sat 5 May 2012, 22:24, Reply)