To feel stressed by all the old laptops

[Designless]

Where do you dispose of yours? I know they say just wipe the hard drive and give to a recycling place but ours tend to die before we replace so we can't do that and now I have a tonne of dusty laptops I'm scared to give away in case someone steals our identities.

Same. We just moved house with 4 dead laptops. I don't know what to do with them either 🤣

Remove the hard disk and hit it repeatedly with a hammer

Soak in water overnight, put into a bag and batter with a hammer.

Unscrew the hard drives and break them/drill and hole, hammer etc. Then you can send the laptop for recycling.

Take the hard drive out first if you like.

Or reformat it (properly), that's pretty secure.
If it's an SSD, just a normal format.
If it's a HDD, make sure it's a full format not a quick format.

This but make the water salty

Take a hammer to them and put them in the normal rubbish.

Please don’t put them in landfill. Recycle them.

Remove the hard drive and drill holes in it.

There is obviously a need for more laptop destruction centres. I don’t want to try getting out hard drives, don’t know what I’m doing. Is there such a thing as a laptop top, tablet destroyer which works like a shredder.

This is what I do (after soaking in water).

They get all crushed up in the back of the bin lorry anyway.

Or drill through it several times.

Or do what I do and have a drawer full of old hard drives. They'll be my kids problem when I'm gone

If you're going to do that make sure you remove the battery first.

How does everyone know how to remove a hard drive?? Can I just use a normal screwdriver? It's less worrisome with the older style ones where you can easily clip out the battery first but the ones with the internal battery freak me right out. Aaaa the emotional burden!

Agree with removing hard drive but make sure your new laptop doesn’t get mixed up with the old ones. £550 brand new laptop and I ripped the hard drive out!

Look on YouTube for the make and model. There will be a video of someone doing it

No need to worry about breaking the laptop as its for the bin anyway

I donate ours to a local group that reboots them (thus deleting all previous info) refurbishes them and donates them to individuals, schools, charities who need them.

What I do is

1. let the battery go flat
2. unscrew with screwdriver and lever out hard drive.
3. screw back together
4. take to Curry’s (uk shop) who give a voucher for tech handed in for recycling.
5. if I don’t need the voucher I give it away on a free site, so someone else can benefit.
6. I keep the hard drive, but they don’t take up much room.

Equipment like this still ha a useful life. Please don’t just bin it.

Surely they won’t take them?

Don’t put in landfill - the components are valuable can be recycled. Remove hard drive if possible and take to an electronics recycling place like curry’s.

I am pretty sure that you at least have to remove the battery before binning otherwise it might go kaboom

I don't understand how society has allowed these dread millstones to come about it's just awful

They don't go through our bins and split all the bags open.

They just stick them on the back of the truck and tip them upside down.

I just put them in the laptop recycling but at the household waste site.

Nobody gives a shit about what's on your hard drive.

I’ve always taken the hard drives out of old laptops and kept them, just in case I ever desperately need any of the data again.

I take mine to the office and ask IT to put them in the electronic waste disposal bin. This gets collected by a specialist company who shred the hard drives and recycle what they can of the rest.