Purchasing Refurbished Computers

[tom]

Concerns about the environment don’t end once a computer has been bought. Consumers also need to consider what to do with their computers when it comes time to retire them.

A relatively new site:
Environmental Assessment Tool, or Epeat, an electronics rating system available free at www.epeat.net (http://www.epeat.net)
EPEAT is a system to help purchasers in the public and private sectors evaluate, compare and select desktop computers, notebooks and monitors based on their environmental attributes. EPEAT also provides a clear and consistent set of performance criteria for the design of products, and provides an opportunity for manufacturers to secure market recognition for efforts to reduce the environmental impact of its products.

To lessen your impact on the environment one should try to keep their computers longer and purchase a refurbished computer if possible.

Dell and many other computer sellers offer refurbisher options.
http://www.dell.com/content/products/category.aspx/desktops?c=us&cs=22&l=en&s=dfh

[mugaliens]

I kept my previous computer for six years before it died - is that long enough? I kept my first computer for nine years! During their lifetimes, I used each as my primary computing platform. A couple of others didn't last so long: my first Windows computer lasted four years before I replaced it with one that lasted just three years.

Summary:
Computer: Lifetime
XT: 9
W95: 4
WNT: 3
WXP: 6
WVista: 1 (it's my first laptop - I'm currently using it as my primary (only!) computer)

As for recycling, I agree. For most families, that's usually in the form of a hand-me-down, such as what I did with my W95 and WNT computers when I upgraded - they became my wife's and son's computer, as neither were into computers much, except for e-mail and kid-appropriate games.

On another note, many countries, Germany included, has a separate recycling bin for electronics, as they will "mine" your old junk for the various elements and compounds needed to build more computers.

While recycling old computers into server farms sounds like a good idea, the reality is that businesses cannot afford frequent outages. Thus, those machines are usually significantly more robust than your average brand-new personal computer.

On the other hand, old computers are finding new life in grid computing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing), whereby loosely-coupled computers are given processor-intensive tasks which can be broken up into many small pieces which do not require any substantial bandwidth to communicate either between tasks or with the grid computing controller.

SETI's SETI@home is one of the best known grid computing projects, and currently boasts a combined processing power of 528 TeraFLOPS, which, as of June 18, 2008, was second in raw processing power only to IBM's BladeCenter QS22/LS21, more commonly known as Roadrunner.

Donating your old computer's processing power is simple - just download and install your favorite project's software. It handles everything else in the background.

There is one drawback, though: All those computers require tons of power, far more than a supercomputer with a comparable processing power. SETI@home, for example, employs 334,000 active computers in the system, each of which draws roughly 200W of power. That's 66.8MW of power, or enough to power a small city.