Reuse of “old tech” seems an alien concept to me, an guy from the late 70’s.
When I was a kid, the latest tech seemed like it would be here for years.
I remember sitting in front of my own TV in my bedroom! Granted it was huge and the set itself was the width of my single bed. It was magnificent though as it was a walnut veneer thing and was a solid wooden build.
I know this, because I fixed an audio jack to the thing so that I could watch TV at night without waking anyone else on the floor. It was only a mono speaker built in and a simple case of wiring in the audio jack -but that was decades ago.
So what about “New Old Tech”?
This is something close to my heart. I don’t like seeing the waste we create, the stories and images of our affect on our planet.
The generations before me were using paper for food wrapping and there were very little in the way of plastics being used, so to eat your chips with? – no… a wooden spork (Spoon-Fork).
Anyway, so I have worked in the IT industry long enough to know that when a laptop is classed “dead” by it’s user, the actual hardware components are not necessarily all useless. We’ve been doing this for decades with desktop machines and their parts. We harvest the good bits and use them again in other projects.
However laptops are slightly different. The hardware used in your general laptop (especially newer ones) will be very compact and even the inter connecting wires are either inbuilt paths on the actual boards themselves or, like with your laptop screen, you’ll often see a cable strip or small wires. It all depends on manufacturers or technology at the time the laptop was made.
So what about this hardware?
It depends on the situation and I look for specific things.
The Storage (HDD or SSD etc) isn’t much use unless you know the history of the machine you are getting. Also, unless the laptop is dead but the screen works, I don’t bother with company laptops.
I recently got one for myself from a company and even though I took out the old HDD for a new SSD, the system still believes it’s registered to that company, so be warned.
The screens are the best for reuse, in my humble opinion.
These are generally reusable as stand alone monitor / TVs and usually they can run at a lower power need than the laptop itself (remember laptops are battery use mad).
So the upshot is, that you can reuse the following:
- Laptop motherboard
- Laptop Screen
- Laptop Webcam
So how?
Well the how is coming in another post but sign up for the newsletter and you’ll get notified.
