Where do all the old business pcs go?

chtyrone

I was wondering where all the old business pcs go to.

Dublin on it's own should be generating tens of thousands of the things, and the WEEE regulations should mean more of them should reappear.

They should pop up on EBay, at office auctions, fairly large refurbished pc shops..

Karoma

The above and employees homes/friends/family, schools, charities...

L31mr0d

There are 2 places i know of. I've used them to get 10GB HDDs and some monitors for a computer society. My first computer ever came from here Fingal recycling as well

fingalrecycling.ie
electronic-recycling.ie

Stephen

Where I work we keep the PC's so long that they're useless to pretty much everyone by the time they're gotten rid of. They get to such a state that the likes of schools don't want them - total cost of ownership and all that.

layke

My compny horde everything. We have those really old hefty white bomb proof cases that cut your finges when you open them. The PC is so bloody slow it's unreal and useless, they in fact hinder your performance.

Sigh* All because irish companies are too scabby to spenjd some money.

They will end up in a skip eventually due to the reasons above.

Standard Toaster

My place considers 6months old....old.

If it's not being used it's chucked out. They bought a €5000 plasma telly for network monitor and it hasn't been setup yet....6months later.

Madness....

Anyway, I think they use fingalrecycling.ie too

projectmayhem

where my dad works they get rid of PC's constantly (them being a communications company) and they get sold off cheap to employee's. any surplus is giving to schools and charities etc.

chtyrone

Thanks for all the answers folks. Much obliged.

seamus

I'm looking after this at the moment for our place. We have a ton of old machines that need to be gotten rid of. Anything that's not reasonably usable gets sent off for trashing. Anything else is given to charity.

DublinWriter

I used to tap some of my bigger clients for their old PC gear, refurb it and send it on to the likes of Chun Mhaire, Home Alone, The Salvation Army, etc, etc

However I found that in the past 3-4 years most companies are increasingly holding onto their PCs ad the average spec PC of 2003 is more than capable of still running MS Office applications, so why upgrade?

There's an organisation in London with about 20/30 volunteers and employees that take donated IT equipment, refurb it, and send it onto schools in the 3rd World. They run a massive warehouse type operation.

Lovely to see that kind of 'Wombling' operation in-action, everybody wins.

seamus

DublinWriter wrote:

However I found that in the past 3-4 years most companies are increasingly holding onto their PCs ad the average spec PC of 2003 is more than capable of still running MS Office applications, so why upgrade?

Well, this is the thing. With MS Vista being waay overdue, PC requirements haven't shot up like they previously have. There's also a general topping-out in terms of business requirements. With the exception of anyone doing any heavy data processing or image processing, business machines really only need to run XP, Office and Internet Explorer. Anything more than 1.5GHz and 256MB of RAM will handle it well enough for your normal user.

When Vista and Office 12 are released, the whole thing will kick off again. I'd expect XP to go end-of-life around 2009 so many of the bigger companies will have their old hardware cleared out well before then.

I do expect the move to Web 2.0 (buzzword if ever there was one) and the overall push towards server-based applications to actually reduce the desktop demand to dumb terminal levels. It will push up server requirements quite heavily though.

conzy

We have a terminal services Network in school:D

Its a farm of AST Pentium machines hooked up to a Xeon Server, Works quiet well actually, Even when a few of us are using GIMP.

DublinWriter

seamus wrote:

When Vista and Office 12 are released, the whole thing will kick off again. I'd expect XP to go end-of-life around 2009 so many of the bigger companies will have their old hardware cleared out well before then.

Personally, I think companies won't rush to implement Vista as much as you think.

When you consider it, it will be a lot of pain for very little gain. Considering the high spec hardware requirements, the training requirements and new licencing requirements, many companies won't budge.

After all, 90% of corporate PC usage is basically just email, banging out the ocassional email and spreadsheet. Plus most large corporate enterprise applications are all thin-client browser based now anyways.

I know a lot of public sector organisations in the UK are implementing open-source at the desktop and I think the private sector will slowly follow suit.

Vista just might be the end of the road of Microsoft. We'll see!

ShiverinEskimo

Highly unlikely - When you consider that the likes of Dell and other massive PC suppliers will adopt Vista and ship it with all new PCs plus every Executive will be sick of reading how good Vista is and what it does for your company it will be lapped up. After all - no exec is going to stick with XP if they hear one of their competitors has made the jump. Like every major Windows release it will be lapped up.

There's also the point that the IT guys of each company will be using it at home and will want to use it at work and therefore recommend it to their board.

Vista will be massively marketed by MS and as always Joe Soap business and home user will follow like sheep. And why wouldn't they.

DublinWriter

ShiverinEskimo wrote:

After all - no exec is going to stick with XP if they hear one of their competitors has made the jump. Like every major Windows release it will be lapped up.

There's also the point that the IT guys of each company will be using it at home and will want to use it at work and therefore recommend it to their board.

No offense - but that's a highly simplistic view of how corporates define their I.T. strategy and/or budget.

Any exec will *first* look at the bottom line on the cost of upgrading and the first question asked will be "What extra are we getting for this? How will this give us a competitive advantage?".

Any CIO/IT Director/IT Manager recommending something to the board based on what he's using at home and without a supporting business case would be escorted to the gate .

As you correctly said, Dell will start preloading it and it will come in through the back door, especially with the SMEs. However, most major organisations will nix it, for a while anyway.

seamus

For a very short while, I would say. It becomes envitable that the longer you hold onto a technology, the more money it costs you. Any businesses currently running any version of windows that's not 2k or XP are most probably suffering more in terms of support and compatibility than those that aren't. There are 3 NT machines left in my place (for about two more weeks ), and even the simple tasks like adding a network printer can take up to 20 minutes, as opposed to the 30 seconds it takes on the XP machines. All those support minutes add up to hours - and time is money.

Vista has been delayed so long, that companies are chomping at the bit to work with it, and I'd say within two years of its release, few software manufacturers will have "Designed to work with Windows XP" on the box.

I know of one massive financial multinational that has already planned its strategic rollout of Vista, it's just waiting for the software to be released. As ShiverinEskimo points out - off the bat, you'll find it next to impossible to obtain a new OEM machine without Vista on it. Companies will buy these machines in bulk, and before you know it they have a small pool of machines with minor but niggly compatibility problems to the rest of the network.
And you're not going to downgrade them....

ShiverinEskimo

DublinWriter wrote:

Any CIO/IT Director/IT Manager recommending something to the board based on what he's using at home and without a supporting business case would be escorted to the gate .

I totally agree - but any members of the IT department who are familiar with Vista through a personal level will always be thinking about what it could offer to their company. If they find it more useful and thus feel it has something to offer it will not be long before their experiences on a personal level will translate into a supporting business case or at least encourage an assessment which MS will be happy to answer any questions positively on...

MS' marketing will be a tsunami of advertisements to SME's and I'm sure will include visits by pimps to Corporate level customers. XP to Vista is tipped to be as much a jump in technology as 3.1 to 95 - whether thats true or not, MS will make you believe it is.

netwhizkid

http://www.wastematchers.com/ I read bout this in Mondays Irish Examiner, it is a site aimed at swapping and trade of old office equipment amongst Business's however it is only for business's and not for the average Joe Soap. Still it might be handy to someone If there is anything useful on it that is. Wouldn't a domestic home version be a good idea too allowing Business's the opportunities to offload old stuff to people who might need it.

SeanW

I don't think there's going to be any huge rush among organisations to go with Win Vista TBH.

I remember at college, they were using Windows NT until about a year before I left, and then they upgraded to Windows 2000. Now, this is long after Windows XP came about. What's more, they got a whole bunch of computers from Dell and THEY came with Windows 2K as well. So if you're an organisation buying a bulk shipment of PCs, make no mistake, they'll accomodate anyone wanting an older OS on them. Unless the college got the software seperately.

Besides, what does Vista really have to offer ... anyone? XP is fine, it's not like the days on Windows 3.1 and 9X when you went up a step because the last one was so crappy you just hoped and prayed the next version didn't crash so much etc.

As long as new or recent versions of Office work on Win XP, I can't see a stampede to Windows Vista. Could be wrong though.

Stephen

If you have a large corporate account with dell (i.e. you buy lots of stuff from them) and you can supply them with disk images, they will put whatever the hell you want on your machines before they ship them.

zilog_jones

I don't think there'll be any mad rush to Vista either. In UL the majority of the machines (even new ones they got this year) are still running 2k, and it's going to take them a good while before all their PCs would actually be capable of running Vista - there's still a good few Pentium IIs floating about there.

As for the place I'm working at for co-op - they have about 75 PCs here. They didn't touch XP until at least after SP1 came out as they thought it was too unreliable, and all PCs that came with 2000 are still running 2000 with whatever version of Office that came with it - they don't really see a need to upgrade from Office XP to 2003 either. So I can't see this place going straight to Vista either - they'd probably wait at least a year or two, and again it'd only be the new PCs that come in would have it (assuming Vista can work with Win2k/2003 server ok).