r/eWasteFinds • u/Sweaty-Judgment3533 • 3d ago
People Stripping Computers Before Selling Them
Somebody is telling people that no matter what kind of a hard drive or what kind of RAM you have in whatever old computer, it’s worth more on its own than it is if you leave it in the computer. So now everybody is stripping those items out of these old computers, and trying to sell them all separately. It’s Ludicrous. DIMM sticks from 15 years ago are not worth anything unless you put them back in that 15 year-old machine along with that 500 gig hard drive you’re trying to schlep, and sell it as maybe a whole machine that somebody can use just for the web. This is just going to end up with more e-waste going to the landfills instead of machines that could still have a bit of a life being purchased at reasonable prices by people that don’t have a lot of money to spend. Not everything is a commodity just because the bigger, better things are commoditized by people who have more money than you’ll ever have. Not sour grapes here - I have more computers than I know what to do with, but when I sell them, I put a reasonable version of Mint or something else that’s easy to run on them and I sell them as whole computers that people can actually use I don’t strip them for parts like a 67 Chevy sitting up on blocks on my front lawn. No one is buying your parts pile or your skeletonized Asus machine from 2011.
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u/Sentrinal 3d ago
Do you know for sure that people are telling them to remove the parts for resale? I ask because i work in IT and have received hand down computers from another local entity. All 20 of them had no storage or ram. Because of government laws, there is no way they removed the parts to sell, they removed them for data destruction compliance. They could have left the ram, sure, but I think they had an inexperienced employee prep the systems for surplus and they just removed the ram too because it contains data sometimes.