Well, save the box, and power supply if it's 300 or more watts,
if the HD is functioning and CD ROM, then get a cheap bundle deal
(I saw an AMD athlon lowest quad core for 99 US and a cheap moboard/memory)
and your doing (roughly) 8 or 10 times the results for similar energy usage).
This is of course if your financial situation will allow, please
don't read any guilt into my suggestion, it is just an idea.
I have similar questions about my machines, fortunately only
paying 7 cents a Kilowatt hour (in Canada).

I guess we can only say Farewell to a faithful worker, enjoy
your rest.

Me oldest current machine - Athlon 900mhz
Tom has been around pre-UD, has crunched for a lot of projects and has almost a year here. I hate to see it go but I should do the same thing.

tom 5/18/10 0:363:09:01:27 224,722 556

As much as I'd like a smaller form factor- If I can recycle at least the monster case I may be able to avoid the whole "What? Another computer?" discussion

yes laptops will use less energy but they are also not built as good for heat management... so if you decide to use a laptop long term remember to watch the temperatures on them since some (if not most) do not do well 24/7 at 100% cpu speeds

saying all of that i defiantly understand the dropping of aged machines. all of the 3 (soon to be 4) systems i have functional are not new machines by any standard but they are not incredibly old either.

I do agree there is a time to end a computers life.

oh personally i do not get rid of hard drives period since i know how hard it is to fully wipe all data off them... i normally use them as a backup for data that i want to keep but i don't necessarily need powered up or high speed for. In fact i have a stack (in a fire resistant safe) that contain alot of information and copies of pictures and such i want to keep a backup of.. most these drives are the pre 100 gig size but are large enough for my purpose.

there are (in the US) a lot of places to turn in your old machine (e-cycle) some of the places though will try to clean up and resell them if you allow them to instead of e-cycle so depending you might think of it as taking your computer for organ donation for other systems you might build in the future and donate any other pieces to other systems for other people then you have gotten the best use out of your computer post running.

another option is there are some people out there who will want to add your computer to there army of computers and who knows they may even pay you to ship them your old system for them to power up for Distributed computing.

Pre-1Ghz computers are really old.
I terminated the "contract" of a Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz because after my calculation on energy vs. computing output, it was really uneconomical.

I used a 1.7Ghz Dual Core Laptop 24/7 (100% CPU) for about 8-9 months and no problem. I used one of the active coolers under the laptop to cool-it (works like a charm). I took it out of the grid only because I have other important work to do with it.

My Pentium 4 2.4GHZ (1.2 Gflops)used around 120-150W and the laptop Dual Core 1.7 GHZ (3.4 Gflops) between 50-65W. You do the math. And it is a 2-2.5 years old laptop. Oh ... and one more thing... that is a 600-700 $ laptop (Packard Bell).