Top 5 Ways to Save with Your Old Laptops and Devices
A lot of people have an old laptop or other electronics gadget sitting in their homes. People often discard the old models because they think that keeping an old device at home won’t help them in any way. With the amount of e-waste generated globally increasing every year, it amounts to throwing out as many as thousands of laptops every minute.
E-waste can cause environmental pollution with all the toxins produced by it. Every person should do their bit to reduce the amount of e-waste generated in the world. You can start by deciding not to discard your old laptop or electronic devices because you want a new one.
Find out the top 5 ways to prevent your old laptops or devices from ending up in landfills.
1. Sell Your Laptop or Old Devices
Did you know that you can sell your old device and earn money for it? It will ensure that someone else is using the old machine or it is being recycled. Many recycling service providers use some parts of your old devices to manufacture new electronic gadgets. It reduces the cost of production by eliminating the need to build components from scratch.
But before you start searching where to sell my laptop in search engines and contacting someone to dispose of it off, remove all data from it to prevent a data breach. You should remove all the data on your hard drive by clicking on Shift+Del. After that, you should overwrite the files multiple times, including data shredding programs. The more times you overwrite your data, the more difficult it will be to retrieve it. Several data shredding programs like Eraser and WipeFile can be used to overwrite the files.
We often store sensitive data on our laptops. Wiping and deleting sensitive data might not be enough in some cases. Therefore, encrypting all your drives, folders, and files is an additional safety measure. Data encryption increases the safety of your data and protects it from threats of breaching. Before sending your laptop for recycling or selling it, always encrypt everything stored in it. It will ensure that no one else can access your data as they will need an encryption key to browse your data.
2. Use the RAM of Your Laptop on Other Devices
A laptop can have several types of RAM with varying storage capacity, clock speed, and even shape. Memory technologies have not witnessed too frequent changes. Therefore, the chances are you will be able to use the RAM of your laptop on another device.
We often upgrade the RAM of our laptops. In that case, the old RAM of the computer can be used in some other device as well. Even if you can’t use the RAM on any other device, you can sell it in the market. It not only reduces environmental waste but also helps you earn some quick cash.
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3. Use Your Old Laptop or Tablet as a Digital Photo Frame
You can easily convert your laptop or tablet into a digital photo frame where you can show a slideshow of your favorite pictures. If you are turning your laptop into a digital photo frame, you will have to disassemble it almost entirely and put it inside a shadow box. Several easy-to-use software is there to help you make a slideshow for your digital photo frame. You can decide on the number of minutes and seconds for the display of each photo.
4. Reuse the HDD or SSD of Your Laptop
Selling a hard drive won’t help you make a lot of money. Moreover, selling it will mean that you need to backup all the data stored on it. Backing up all the data on your hard drive can be a huge hassle and is time-consuming as well. /but you can easily remove the hard drive from your old device and use it on your laptop. You can make an external drive out of it whether you find an IDE or SATA hard drive on your laptop. Put the hard drive into a 2.5″ USB case and begin using it.
Also Read: Is The Forest Split Screen?
5. Convert Your Laptop into a Gaming Server
If you have an old functional laptop, you can transform it into a gaming server. When you are playing multiplayer games online, you connect to the server of the manufacturer, where the connections of other players are handled. With your own gaming server, you will be able to play multiplayer games with friends without connecting to the game developer’s faulty server. But your old laptop should be functional enough to run several gaming programs.
Ending Note
Dumping your old laptop in the landfill only adds to the pile of e-waste that has been discarded already. Since you invested in your old device once upon a time, you should utilize it to the fullest possible extent to appreciate its value.
