Don't just throw out your old parts. They might be more useful than you think
When you upgrade your system, it can be tempting to just chuck the parts you've replaced in a skip, or give them to someone else. After all, second-hand computer hardware is usually difficult to sell on, and there's no sense leaving it in a cupboard somewhere to gather dust.
But before you get rid of your old components, think for a moment about what else you might do with them. An upgrade isn't just about adding new hardware to your system; it's also about extending your system's capabilities, and with a few tweaks that's exactly what old hardware can do.
Obviously some components are single use. You won't find many ways to incorporate an old CPU or motherboard into your system, and your RAM either fits or it doesn't, but there some components and peripherals that can be reused in unexpected ways. Before you throw anything away, read through our guide so you know exactly what can be salvaged from obsolescence and how.
Routers
Although they look like quite simple boxes from the outside, routers are actually surprisingly powerful inside. You might not be able to tell from looking, but they house fairly capable CPUs, which usually run their own reduced versions of a Unix- or Linux-like operating system. This means that with the right coaxing, you can make them do far more than they initially seem capable of. If you imagine what a Raspberry Pi can do, that's about the same level of power we're talking about here.
If you replace your router with a new one, the temptation might be to simply chuck the old one away, but don't be so hasty. Even an average wireless router will probably have the ability to function as a network bridge or repeater, both of which allow you to extend your networks in different ways. Bridges provide wireless connectivity to non-wireless devices, whereas repeaters extend a wireless signal to areas with weak coverage, so both are fairly useful to have connected to your network.
How easy it is to tune a wireless router into either of these device modes heavily depends on the age and sophistication of the router, but a large number of models won't even need so much as a firmware upgrade to get started. If your hardware doesn't seem to support it, you can also try installing custom firmware, such as DD-WRT, which can essentially give your hardware a free upgrade.
The world of custom router firmware is largely dominated by the Open WRT project (openwrt.org), which emerged because Linksys built the firmware for its hugely popular WRT54G model using open-source code. Since the inception of the project, it has expanded to cover a much larger range of devices and has averaged a major update every year since 2006. The current version supports a huge number of features, many of which are impossible to access on a router's standard software.
These features include, of course, the ability to give any supported wireless device the capacity to function as a repeater, access point, bridge, portal or a combination of the same. The huge amount of features and massive modification potential of OpenWRT is what gives it its fans, but it's worth noting that not every router supports every function, and many models aren't supported at all. A full list of supported devices is available on the OpenWRT site.
And of course, if none of that sounds appealing, there's one thing you can do that requires almost no modification: by connecting your old router to your new one using the uplink port, you can extend the amount of physical ports on your network and create a second wireless guest network, which shares your internet connection but has different restrictions, so you can apply parental controls to your children's browsing or give access to guests and visitors without disclosing your actual password.
The main problem with reusing an old router is that it's likely to be slower than the one you replaced it with, which has the potential to create a network bottleneck. The good news is that since Wireless AC runs on both 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies, compatibility with the latest hardware shouldn't be an issue whether your router runs Wireless G or Wireless N signals. Restrictions beyond that are minimal: you need a plug socket to power it and the technical capability to administer the router. If you can get over those hurdles, the hardware you might have chucked away is simply ripe with possibilities for reuse.
Hard Drives
Hard drives are quite easy to repurpose and reuse, and the speed at which storage space drops means it's not uncommon to have a spare hard drive lying around that can be put into service in more than one way.
Clearly, the way you reuse a spare hard drive is to create secondary storage for a system. Everything from your desktop system to your routers to your TV probably has the ability to connect to USB storage, and although most external hard drives use a 2.5" laptop-size drive (which can be powered solely over USB), this doesn't exclude you from using a 3.5" drive. All you need to do is buy an external drive caddy for as little as £10.
Drive caddies essentially allow you to turn any hard drive into its own external unit. They come with their own USB connection, and for 3.5" drives they'll also come with a separate power cable. Inside you'll usually find a SATA connector, but if you have an older drive, you should be able to find one with an IDE connector. Some units even come with an interchangeable connector so you can use both.
Once you have an extra drive, the question is what you use it for. If anything, the main obstacle to hard drive reuse is that the units themselves wear out comparatively quickly. It's rare for any computer component to die of old age, but hard drives have moving parts and require extremely high fidelity operation, which means that the average lifespan of a home unit can be measured in years, after which point you risk seeing bad sectors and head crashes.
If you do reuse your hard drive, then, the golden rule is that you make sure it doesn't contain anything essential. Use it for temporary backups and storage, rather than anything long-term. Fill it with data you can afford to lose. That way, if it does succumb to the flaws inherent in its design, you won't feel like you've lost out.
We think that makes them best-suited for containing rippable and downloadable media, such as music and video, which can be fairly easily replaced in the event of a crash or data corruption. Attach the unit to your router's USB port, and the built-in DLNA server should allow you to stream your media from any device on the network, if not anywhere on the internet (depending on the sophistication of your router).
You can also use a hard drive to watch media on your smart TV or set-top box, but in most cases those devices can also use a hard drive as a recording device, which is another way you can use them: rather than fill them with media you've downloaded, you can fill them with media you've recorded off broadcast or use them as a buffer to allow you to pause and rewind live TV.
Of course, an external hard drive can be used for a number of other things, but the power requirements of a 3.5" drive caddy mean that it's not especially portable and not particularly convenient for moving around a lot. Our advice is that you find a largely static use for it (which will also extend its life), so using it as a media library ticks all the boxes.
USB Sticks
USB storage keys are now so cheap and throwaway that if you've acquired one recently, it's probably because it was given away free as a promotional item or placed inside a novelty-shaped keyring that one of your distant relatives bought you at Christmas. But this means that these once-prized pieces of hardware are increasingly ending up consigned to drawers and boxes, never to be used again, when they could be helping you in your daily life -not necessarily as storage either.
For example, you could use a USB drive to create a boot drive, which is useful both as an emergency recovery disk or as a portable system that you can access from any PC with a USB port. A USB drive can easily be imbued with a specially modified copy of Linux (Puppy Linux and Pendrive Linux are two organisations distributing versions well suited to this task) or even bootable versions of Windows using utilities like WinToFlash. The result is a portable system that you can access on other people's computers or if your own stops working.
If you're feeling paranoid, you could even do the opposite and create a USB 'suicide disk', which can wipe a system in seconds. Creating a suicide disk is a fairly easy process. If you want to do it for free you can use Darik's Boot and Nuke (available from www.dban.org), which does all the difficult stuff for you. When installed on a USB drive, DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it detects, making it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction. The commercial software Active Killdisk will do the same to a variety of professional standards and can be downloaded from www.killdisk.com.
On a completely different tack, if you have a game console, you might be able to use it to add storage to the device. Certain games consoles support USB for a variety of uses. Microsoft, which for years delighted in charging inflated costs for tiny hard drives to use as storage space, now allows you to format a USB key to the Xbox 360 or Xbox One file system (through the dashboard) and use it to store saved games, backups and profile information. It won't be readable on your PC any more without a reformat, but it's far more cost-effective than buying a memory card!
Alternatively, you can leave your USB key in the Windows format and use it to store media, such as videos and music, which you can then play through your console. Wii users, unfortunately, are out of luck - the console does not officially support USB storage.
Finally, you could use your drive to create a hardware lock for your system. Security dongles aren't normally used on home systems, but you can easily create one using a USB key. Just download and install Predator (tinyurl.com/ predusbmm), select a USB drive to use with it, then follow the setup instructions. From that point on, as long as predator is running (you can set it to launch with Windows) the USB key will need to be connected to your computer in order for it to function. Pull out the USB key, and the keyboard and mouse stop working and the screen goes dark. Plug the drive back in, and it's all instantly put back in working order. Useful stuff - and it'll make you feel a bit like a secret agent at the same time!
Monitors
A new monitor can be a thing of beauty. In fact, just upgrading the monitor can sometimes make it feel like you have a completely new system, so reusing an existing one might make it feel like you're holding your computer back unnecessarily. But it's always useful to have a second screen around, and if your desk is big enough, then why not take the ultimate step and run your system in a multi-screen configuration?
Previously confined to movies about hackers, the advent of cheap and long-lived LCD monitors means that multiscreen systems are within the reach of the average user. Buyers are more likely than ever to buy a new monitor, because they want to upgrade a working screen rather than replace a dead one. Sure, your existing monitor may not have bells and whistles like a 3D polarised screen or super-high refresh rate, but Windows isn't picky. All you need is a spare HDMI, DVI or DisplayPort cable and it'll connect to both.
Running a dual-screen system has many advantages, not least if you're the sort of person who likes to watch TV or keep one eye on Twitter while working. If you have more than one system in your home, you could even use VNC to telnet into another computer, or use screencasting software so it becomes a mirror of your tablet or phone. There's a surprisingly large number of things you can do with a spare monitor that make computing both easier and more powerful, and they're far more valuable to the average user than the £50 you might get from selling an old screen-second hand.
Luckily, the disadvantages of using a second screen are negligible. The option may be unavailable if you only have on-board graphics capabilities, but in most cases any card with two output ports will be capable of multi-screen output. Of far greater concern are the abilities of the monitor itself. If it has a significantly lower resolution or screen size, or noticeably poorer brightness and contrast levels, it might be aesthetically displeasing to use.
If your desk is small, it could simply take up too much space to be worth using, and you will have to devote extra resources to running it. But by most reasonable criteria, a second monitor is useful enough to compensate for any of these smaller issues.
And even if a second screen isn't what you want, look at it this way: LCD monitors are essentially televisions with the broadcast receivers ripped out. Buy a cheap Freeview set-top box / Apple TV or similar and you essentially have a new TV, which you can put in any room you like. There are a few small problems you might encounter: if your monitor doesn't have integrated speakers you'll need to buy a pair and make sure you have a set-top box with a compatible audio-out connector, but even then, it's cheaper and more versatile than buying a new TV.
Complete Systems
If you've replaced a computer system in its entirety, you might wonder if there's any way you can reuse it productively without having to buy an extra monitor and peripherals. Assuming you don't want to donate it to a worthy cause, there are a few ways you can repurpose a system in your own home that don't involve the case propping up a shelf in the wardrobe.
One interesting project you could try is to turn the system into a NAS device. Network attached storage can be an incredibly useful addition to a home, and if your router doesn't support external storage (or you want to add a multi-drive storage solution that supports high-end features like RAID, rather than a simple single-drive solution), then the husk of an old system can be easily repurposed.
All you have to do is bung in a couple of new hard drives (ideally in a RAID array), and it'll be as fast, sturdy and reliable as anything you can buy on the specialist NAS market - if, admittedly, a little larger and noisier. Use it for backups and/or as a file server, perhaps using software like FreeNAS, and compensate for the lack of a monitor and input peripherals by installing TightVNC, which allows you to remotely log into it from your normal desktop system (or indeed, laptop, tablet or smartphone).
Along similar lines, you could turn it into an HTPC. Like a NAS device, an HTPC doesn't need its own monitor, but in this case that's because it'll be connected to a TV instead. All you have to do is fill your system with media, install a front-end like Kodi (the former XBMC) and invest in a remote control, and you'll have a system that can store and serve your entire video library on demand like your own personal Netflix. This is ideal for old laptops and mini-towers that are small enough to fit beneath a TV cabinet (and quiet enough not to interrupt you). Buy a game controller and you could even turn it into a retro gaming console with the use of a few emulators!
If you're more interested in harnessing the purer computing power of an old system, you could follow a different route and turn it into a dedicated server - perhaps for your favourite multiplayer game or for a distributed system like Folding® Home. There's something particularly fun about having your own Minecraft server for you and your friends to play on, though you might be content in the knowledge that your PC might help develop a medical treatment that eventually saves the life of you or someone you know. All you donate for these privileges is the small amount of money it costs to run an extra system alongside your main one.
And of course, rather than do any of these things, you might want to sell it! While old components are largely impossible to make any money on, there's always demand for working systems, and you'd be surprised what still sells. If you do decide to sell your system on, remember to secure your PC before you get rid of it, so you're protected against fraud. Wipe the hard drive thoroughly before selling on any system!
So there you have it. Plenty of ways to repurpose old hardware so it actively benefits you. Maybe next time you're about to consign that disused hardware to the bin, you'll think twice and see whether there's something else you can do with it instead!
Donating Your Hardware
Even if you can't find something to do with your unwanted components, that doesn't mean you should just chuck them in the bin. Just because you think your old hardware is useless, that doesn't mean that someone, somewhere can't put it to work. Several organisations around the world will take your old PC components off you and recycle them for use in the economically developing world.
Organisations like RecycleUSB (recycleusb.com/index.php7/start-recycling) turn unwanted USB drives into devices containing 'Sugar on a Stick', a USB learning-centric operating system (based on Fedora/Linux) that can be deployed as an educational tool. Computers for Charities (www.computersforcharities.org) will accept old systems and either repurpose them for use by charitable organisations or safely recycle them once the condition has been ascertained.
The catch here is that very few organisations will accept the donation of individual computer components, especially those that don't have their original packaging. In this case, we recommend that you find a way to recycle them instead of throwing them away instead. Guides can be found in various places online (www.recycling-guide.org.uk/materials/computers.html is one good example), but the short version is that you can usually take them to your local waste centre or, in some cases, return them to the manufacturer for proper disposal. If you're not sure what to do, your local council website should contain the necessary information.