Recycled Computers and RAM

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I don’t like to go recycling for two reasons. I usually end my daily walk just at the time when the recycling centre opens during week days so I don’t want to go back and spend time that I could invest in other chores in something as relaxed as recycling. The second reason is that because traffic is bad I usually prefer not to be one of the cars driving down a narrow path when it is not urgent to do so.

Luckily this blog post is not about that. It’s about how people will throw away old desktops and always remove the ram. It makes sense to remove hard drives because it’s not that hard to retrieve data from a disk that has been wiped just once, as we have seen recently with iphones and deleted photos.

I am confused. People throw away ancient machines with ancient ram but for some reason they either feel the need to hoard the ram, or that’s the most interesting thing to take from old machines. RAM is easy to remove from a computer and take home. A desktop less so.

I look out of curiousity, not necessity.

Since switching from Windows to Ubuntu on my HP laptop I have been playing with Immich, Photoprism and attempting to install NextCloud. The beauty of using a proper laptop, rather than a Pi is that it’s much faster, and backing up is easy.

If I found a desktop that required just a hard drive or two then I would gain plenty of freedom to experiment, and that is why finding a desktop at the recycling centre would be interesting.