What To Do With Old 802.11b Equipment?

CyberSlugGump writes "I am trying to declutter, and I have come across my cheap, off-brand, consumer-grade 802.11b wireless routers, PCMCIA cards, and USB adapters. The routers would still be good as 4-port 100Mb switches, and the other devices have at least 32-bit Windows XP drivers available. However, lack of security beyond WEP and the age of the equipment makes me wonder if it is worth any time putting it to use."

Re:ebay

[hedwards]

Or in civilized parts of the world return them for recycling. I'm not sure about the rest of the country how yous handle it, but here in WA you can take that stuff back to pretty much any major electronics retailer and they'll recycle it for free. Since around here manufacturers have to pay for recycling, all we have to do is drop it off and they cover the tab. Sure we ultimately pay for it ourselves, but having the manufacturers handle it ensure that it's done efficiently.

Donate it to the third world !

[assemblerex]

http://www.computeraid.org/ [computeraid.org] refurbishes and ships this stuff to africa and beyond!

Freecycle

[Myopic]

When you don't want old computer equipment, you give it away on your local Freecycle. I thought everyone knew that.

NB: does not work with CRT monitors.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[rwa2]

If you live in a densely populated area with lots of wifi access points around you, running old 802.11b gear will likely degrade the quality or at least the SNR of the other wifi networks on similar channels around you. So keep in mind that running some old gear in the airwaves around could as well do more harm by degrading the throughput of new gear. The new gear could make much more efficient use of the available spectrum, around you, which is getting to be more of a scarce shared resource.

The only thing I'd consider doing with old gear is piecing together "complete systems" geared towards a single use case... maybe a low bandwidth visual paging system for a golf course or something silly like that.

Weird Stuff Warehouse

[Animats]

In Silicon Valley, you take stuff like that to Weird Stuff Warehouse [weirdstuff.com], which handles both surplus and electronics recycling. They're more into commercial gear, though; if you want previous-generation 1U servers, they have plenty.

Re:ebay

[Andy Dodd]

Or ensure that it gets sent to a landfill in China... :(

Apparently a lot of stuff destined for "recycling" winds up in one of the most polluted towns in the world instead.

In the San Francisco area

[Megahard]

Donate to ACCRC [accrc.org]. A recycling shop run by Linux geeks.

Re:Freecycle

[flippy10]

Yeah. If you want to get rid of CRTs... you might have to end up PAYING someone to take it away.

Re:Dump it in the garden

[wed128]

those douchebags aren't even from new jersey...

Re:Trash them or donate them!

[Tirs]

1) Barracks.

2) Everything, each thing, counts and helps.

3) Haiti was just an example. In theory NPOs send stuff to places where they are needed, so they should take care of deciding whether Haiti or (let's say) Madagascar, but the important thing is, they need to have something to send.

Re:I think it's a good question.

[wall0159]

It might make economic sense to buy a new more efficient computer to make savings on your electricity bills, but it's probably still worse environmentally. The amount of power and water used in the manufacture of an average PC is large, and is a cost that is not truly passed-on to the purchaser.
I'm not saying don't buy new PCs because of this, just don't do it thinking it's better for the environment.

"Gartner maintains that the PC manufacturing process accounts for 70 % of the natural resources used in the life cycle of a PC"
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_computing [wikipedia.org]

(similarly, buying a new Prius and claiming you're "doing your bit" for the environment is not true, unless you had to buy a new car anyway.)

Don't send your junk overseas!

[haplesspuppeteer]

I feel compelled to respond to this, even though it'll never receive the attention of the mods because the story is yesterday's.

I've spent a year working in a rural East African hospital, where I helped them rationalise their IT systems and build a site-wide IP phone network, among other things. One of the biggest problems we faced was well-meaning western donors sending old computers and IT hardware!

  - If the only computers you can buy in an East African capital city have SATA connections, why would we want your old IDE drives?

  - If the wireless networking gear we're using is all working at 802.11g, why would we want your old 802.11b gear?

  - If we can't use the stuff, what do we do with it? Throw it into a hole in the ground, where the heavy metals in the components will leech into the water table? Burn it, polluting the local environment? At least in the US or Europe, it'll be disposed of sensibly.

I know it sounds like a good idea; I know it feels better than putting it in the trash. But often palming off your old gear onto a community in the developing world causes more problems than it solves.