Something I’ve been working on recently is collecting old and unused laptops from various people I know. Sometimes they’re shitty Chromebooks that can barely be used but sometimes they’re still perfectly good and recent laptops and people just got bored of them and decided to upgrade for whatever reason. I then put Linux on these laptops (even the shitty chromebooks) and distribute them to people at my college who need one.
With the date that Microsoft is stopping support for windows 10 approaching quickly, now’s a great time to prevent e-waste by upgrading to Linux or collecting people’s previous laptops as they upgrade. You can also get distributions that run better than windows on low-end hardware. Even if you don’t know someone who needs a laptop, you can always do something like host a Minecraft server to make use of it.
Also, you can do this to phones too. There are plenty of custom ROMs you can load on Android phones to squeeze more life out of them. Let me know if you want recommendations.
Anyway, I hope that this can inspire more people to try and repurpose electronics to prevent them from becoming e-waste.
It’s hard sometimes, I needed a new laptop to get a better CPU for video encoding. I now have my older laptop, which is actually a hand me down, so it’s old, but it’s going to replace my even older laptop that’s running a 2nd gen i3. So that’s going to be the one I will likely bring to an eWaste site as it will no longer serve me. Sure I could keep it around as a spare, you never know, but I really doubt that will happen.
All my laptops are running some form of Linux, except one. That’s used to run turbo tax (I know) as the windows software is typically much more affordable over the website version. So that saves me like $50 each year.
Anyway, eventually I’ll need to toss my old pixel xl as the battery only last about 45 minutes and I think lineage isn’t able to update it, I didn’t check the last few months. I was planning to have it be my kids first tablet, but a battery replacement is around $75 I think… Just seems not worth it.
Assuming that there’s no major issues with your laptop, I recommend that you at least donate your laptop to a thrift store or make a Craigslist listing and give it away to someone who could use it as opposed to putting it in the landfill. You never know who might find it useful.
