A New Life For An Old Computer
Why Should I Keep An Old PC
When a computer gets old most people throw it in a drawer, or consider it E waste. But you could sell it and give it another life, or sometimes that computer may have just needed a new charger off EBay for a few bucks, or just a cheap stick of memory. Sometimes it is just better to sell it or give it away to a family member to put a new life into it. This article will go over how to fix your old computer, how to sell it, and wipe it to give it away to somebody needing a computer.
How To Wipe A Computer
Another way to save an old computer is to wipe it and give it to a family member or to sell it (explained below). On an Apple Mac you can do this by clicking the Apple logo in the top left corner of your screen-click on system preferences-click general in system preferences-then erase all content settings. On a Windows computer (these steps should work for regularly updated computers) you can go to the start menu-click on settings-click on system-click on recovery-then click reset this pc. This should wipe your computer clean of any information so when you sell your computer or give it away nobody can access your data. If this still doesn’t make sense here is a helpful video that teaches you how to reset a pc and here is one for mac.
How To Sell A Old Computer
One easy way to make a few bucks off your old tech is to sell it on an online marketplace such as EBay or Mercari. There are lots of tutorials online that you can watch so i’m not going to go too deep into that topic today but here is a beginners guide. First you can create an account using google, apple, sometimes facebook. After signing up you can click the plus in the top corner or at the bottom middle part of your screen. Find your computer settings and name and type it into the name field. If there are any things people need to know about the computer then list those in the description. Take pictures using your phone camera and the app should give you a suggested price which is usually accurate. Then after looking through any banking details you should be set. If this still doesn’t make sense a video is here. This isn’t as hard as you might think.
Finding Parts And Repairing Your Computer
Finding parts can sometimes feel and be a burden but we will give you some helpful tips and tricks so you can repair your old computer. Another simple way to repair your computer is to take it to a trusted computer repair service. Just make sure you read reviews and they charge a fair price compared to other places. Now if you are brave enough to repair your device (which you should be:) then one helpful tip to find a power supply that might have gone missing you can look at the bottom of the charger and type in the voltage and computer charger as long as the plug looks the same and says the same exact voltage you found a new computer charger! If you are using a mac you can usually type the name of that mac into EBay and then power adapter and you should have countless results. For memory, if your computer is new and needs more storage than you can type in SSD on amazon, find ones with good reviews, pick the amount of storage you want and you should be set! For RAM we recommend the same amount of storage for each slot. Most older computers have 2 slots, maybe 4 slots for ram but you can usually just fill 2. Some modern computers don’t offer lots of repair options. You will usually have to go into the Bios of the computer by pressing F2 on startup when you see the logo to make sure all RAM shows up properly. We will leave a helpful tutorial linked here.
Helpful Tools and Fully Upgradeable Computers
A helpful website we use to upgrade our computer is called Ifixit. This website has tutorials on how to upgrade your computer and they do special tutorials on how to upgrade parts of your PC. They have been around for a very long time so you can most likely find information on your PC. If you are looking for a fully repairable PC we recommend the Framework which you can find here. You can find Ifixit’s link here. They sell new motherboards to upgradable ports. We hope you consider these options when repairing or purchasing a PC.
Conclusion
If we all learned to upgrade our PC or bought easily upgradeable PC’s we could minimize a ton of E-Waste and use our devices for longer. We hope you will take inspiration and knowledge from this. Thank you for reading and have a wonderful rest of your day with some new knowledge on computers!