this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2025
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For some reason the only electronics I get asked for help with are literal e-waste which existence must be considered crime against computing, engineering and even humanity. Because of that, my success rate is less than half of cases. Is it bad, or should I consider it good that people only call me in worst possible cases where everything else failed?
I beg friends for ewaste and harvest their organs.
Even an Oxford comma couldn't save that one.
relevant xkcd
And what do you do with the ewaste?
I have gotten a ton of free storage this way, makes it totally worth it. If they give me a few old laptops, I put all their data on one drive and take the rest.
And their organs?
The nearest church choir gets those
Pretty sure I could build a battery bank that would rival styropyro's most recent one.
Nothing is e-waste if you're skilled enough
Anything made by Dell is. Try disassembling one of their mini PCs. I don't know what tools they have at the dell manufacturing plant, but they must not be made of normal matter that's all I can tell you, because otherwise how have they managed to put a screw that holds the PSU in place, under the PSU itself.
I'd really give it a try, if I had one. I find some pleasure in trying to fix and find new life for unused hardware, no matter how old or weird it is. Well, sometimes I fail, but I keep it in case I get nrw ideas for it in the future.
what do you do with a laptop that has 4 GB ram and a HDD of the slower kind? xfce is not really more memory efficient than plasma.
4 gb is pretty reasonable for light usage. The hdd can be formatted as btrfs with compression for better performance. I'd also consider replacing the hdd with an ssd and using the hdd as extra storage, if possible.
HP laptops are like that, unfortunately.
Never hear of them. But it sounds like the famous brand du
Acers are like that in my experience. The last one I got with the complaint of "being too slow" had half the case empty because they re-used the old case that was supposed to have a CD-drive in it. And, in it's place, there was a fan with no heatpipes, no radiator, nor even any holes on the bottom, just some spacers so it sucks and recirculates the air from within the case, and blows it somewhere in the general direction of the motherboard, where, a fucking mile away, there's a G-shaped piece of foil with just TWO fins slapped on top of the CPU.
The two gigs of ram are, of course, soldered on, and there was already an ssd (though, on SATA and no secondary port either). So I just settled on blowing the dust out and swapping whatever sludge they had for a decent thermal paste, put Xubuntu on it and advised the nearest recycling plant's address. Of course, I could drill some holes and hack some better thermal solution, but I found that this 5+yr Celeron machine with 720p TN panel is just not worth any effort. It was brand new, btw...