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.

There’s a local charity that takes them in near me and refurbishes them. They have an ISO to signify they are a trusted organisation that would safely dispose of your data. Just google to see if there is a similar place locally.
if you’re near Sheffield …
https://aspire-sheffield.co.uk

Am sitting looking at my Macbook and see no place to 'remove hard drive'. Can't even see where a screwdriver could possibly go.....

Bloody tech bros!!!! Surely they must rust away eventually

Why is this the one thing that lasts forever

This.

DH works in IT security and this is what he did when he recycled a laptop.

The hard drive was smashed to pieces and I think he took out a flimsy bit of something from the debris which I assume is where data actually gets stored and this was cut into small pieces.

If you can find out what model of MacBook it is then I can tell you how to get to the hard disk.

We used to live in Ireland and the local authority held recycling days where they securely disposed of all our tech.

I don't understand why the local authorities don't do that here. 🤷🏼‍♀️

That said, if the tip receives 100 bits of old tech every week, is the recycling centre really going to try and boot up your old laptop to steal your data? Esp if you can't even boot it up?!

I wouldn't imagine they could be bothered.

Same.
We have three old laptops in a pile.

Ours have a secure bin at the waste site you can use all the time.

Thanks, but I have no idea what any of that means.

Same here. What does the hard drive look like?

I also have every smartphone I've ever owned.

@CaptainMyCaptain what?!

Sell them or take them to Vodafone to recycle. They have a scheme where they wipe them and refurbish them to give to people who might need new phones who can't afford one.

That is incredibly kind. I won't burden you with it, but just knowing that such a thing is possible makes me feel braver about finding a youtube video to instruct me.

Is this the week we all get on YouTube and at last manage to rid ourselves of the burden??

Get a grip. Get a screw driver and get on with it.

Are you ok?

Well I didn't come out of the womb knowing it either.
I googled "how to format hard drive on X laptop model".

I took the battery out and put the laptop in our general waste bin. I couldn’t give a crap about the hard drive, I’m not storing government documents, it’s mostly pictures of cats

I delete and recycle most my stuff is cloud based anyway so I just remove acess delete and wipe

Open the cases and smash the hard drives up with a big hammer, then just chuck the lot in the bin.

Fair enough. The ifixit.com website is excellent at giving instructions about how to dismantle laptops etc. Apple being Apple may require you to get a special screwdriver but ifixit will tell you what type to get and you can get them on eBay for very little money.

There's no need to smash the hard disk as that's just as bad for the environment as disposing of other parts.

Remove bottom of laptop.

Remove the disk.

Buy a USB caddy.

Attach USB caddy to the disk.

Plug into a working machine and pull your personal data off it. Then while it's still plugged in, reformat it.

Put old laptop back together with the disk.

Sell it to CEX as not working (the one below grade C) or sell it on eBay as spares or repairs. CEX is the easier option and you'll still get some money for it.

This is what i done, well i smashed first then got bits out hard work and need to be carefull of flying bits so wear protective eye goggles or something. Got 1 more to do but have to be in the mood.

Did you even read the OP?
How did you miss the key element from such a short post?
The laptops are dead. If they can't turn on how are you supposed to reformat them?