At the end of last year, we replaced our PCs that were over 10 years old. And with new equipment there is always the question: What to do with the old one?
We haven’t had the best experience of trying to sell old PCs in one go. So throw them away? But … they work quite well! It would be sad to see them just go to the bin. Also, it just felt wrong to throw away fully functional discs, RAM and graphics cards.
So I decided to try a different approach this time. Disassemble the machines and put all the parts up for sale on eBay separately. Not with the aim of making a lot of money, but to avoid electronic waste. – I took pictures of all the parts, gave them a (really) short description and put them up for auction on eBay for €1. The SSDs and HDDs were reset/overwritten and put online with the corresponding SMART values. I didn’t want to cheat anyone who bought a used disc.
If the parts didn’t sell within a few weeks, I could always throw them away. If each item sold for €1, it wouldn’t justify the effort, but at least the parts could stay in use! Maybe someone just wants to try / learn how to assemble PCs. You likely wouldn’t want to buy brand new components for that, right? Who knows (and actually I don’t care).
The Result: after about 3 weeks, to my surprise, almost all the parts were sold! The mainboard and the DVD burner sold for 1€ and 2€ respectively, but all the other parts sold for more.
And I admit: it was also a bit fun to disassemble the machines. 🙂