Are you finally tired of looking at the 386 pc in the corner of your computer room?  Well, here are some ideas that may help you make use of or discard properly.

 
Check your local phone book - there are recycling facilities in several cities. Websites such as those listed below may also have valuable information. These organizations donate computers or computer parts to educational institutions. There are similar websites all over the Internet.

Attempt to sell your computer on eBay or Craigslist.org. You might be surprised to discover that someone out there will actually pay for your old bucket of bits.

Ask around to see if any of your friends are looking for an older computer. Some tech-savvy people use extra computers for print servers or e-mail stations.

Give it to your parents or grandparents and teach them how to use email and surf the web. Old, slow computers work well at these basic tasks.

Donate it to a local school or charity. A database of charities looking for old computers is available at Share the Technology.

Consider donating it to the nonprofit Computer Recycling Center. They accept all computers, network equipment, and telephones (whether they are working or not). In addition, they will provide you with a receipt of your donation for a tax deduction.

Turn your old computer over to the manufacturer when you buy a new one. Companies such as

Dell and HP will now recycle your old computer for free when you buy a new one from them.

Pay a for profit recycling firm to have your PC taken off your hands and recycled responsibly.

Put a sign on your computer saying "Free old computer - good for parts or case," and leave it out front on a dry afternoon, or offer it on Freecycle.org.

Keep the old computer around as a backup.

If you are disposing of a number of similarly cased computers, you might consider being creative and using them as oversize building blocks. The plastic or metal cases can be connected with Superglue and they can be painted in a bright manner. You can build a small decorative wall, or perhaps a playhouse for the kids in your own backyard.

Do any of the above steps, but just don't throw that computer into the trash. Computers are not biodegradable, and Mother Nature won't appreciate your contribution of an unwanted PC.

A good way to ensure total erasure of private data is to use a secure erase utility; these can be found online for most systems as free utilities. A secure erasure utility not only deletes files (a process that usually leaves almost all of the file intact on your hard drive) but fills your occupied file space with random or zero data. Many erasure utilities perform this data filling several times over to completely eradicate any magnetic ghost data that can be picked up by a data forensics team. If you are looking to erase an entire drive prior to disposal consider a boot-up utility that can clear the entire drive, irrespective of the installed operating system (see Ultimate Boot CD link).

Another way of totally erasing information from a hard drive is to expose it to a very strong magnetic field, using a device with electromagnets called a degausser. This will destroy the drive and make it completely impossible to reuse or recover data from. Common household magnets are usually not strong enough to fully erase a hard drive.

Another way of mostly erasing information from a hard drive is hit it with a hammer repeatedly.

This will render the drive unusable, and make it very expensive to retrieve the data from it.

If you do not wish to consume time doing this, you could always just take out the hard drive manually and reuse it yourself. There's no harm in keeping a backup hard drive around for technological emergencies. Of course, if you are donating your computer for reuse, it would be most helpful if you donate the drive also.

The military wipes sensitive hard drives by melting them with thermite. To make thermite combine equal parts of aluminum powder and rust powder and ignite with a magnesium strip (because the reduction reaction requires high heat to be initiated, a simple fuse or match won't cut it). You should put it in a ceramic flowerpot to contain the reaction and stand well away from it. Your hard drive will be a molten pile of slag once the reactants are all used up.

Warning

Personal information can be stored on computer components and should not be released to others without properly destroying the information. The computer's hard drive is the main concern, while personal information can also be stored on flash memory cards, floppy discs, tapes, DVDs and CDs. Deleting the data from the hard drive does not destroy the data, but simply flags it (as "deleted"). Various methods of deleting offer different levels of destruction. "Government wipe" involves writing random bit sequences over top of the deleted file several times (as the media has a "memory" of previous writes). Degaussing can be used to safely destroy the contents of an entire drive. Physical destruction is also a good method for protecting your privacy when dealing with these computer components.