What to do with old Laptop

[Porge]

I have an old 17" laptop, which is 4 years old.

 

It has an 80 GB HDD and 1 GB memory. The battery life is only 45 mins.

 

I wanted suggestions on how to dispose of this, what should I do with it and how do I ensure all of our personal information is removed.

 

I would be grateful for your help.

[BeeCeeBee]

The first thing I would do is format the computer and restore it to its factory settings, To be ultra safe I would find some shredding software. If there is nothing all that important on it I would first to a manual delete of all files and then restore it.

 

Once that is done I would donate it to a charity that will accept and distribute old computers. I found one list in the UK but have no idea if it is reliable or not. You will need to do the research any of the companies or charities listed. You may also get better results from the UK version of Google.

 

http://www.itforcharities.co.uk/pcs.htm

[KenB]

Hi

 

The battery life is only 45 mins.

You can get replacement batteries.

 

If you wish to recycle this then once you have recovered any wanted data off the drive and formatted it - to basically wipe the drive clean as BeeCeeBee has suggested -then any charity shop would welcome a working laptop as a donation. [ They may mention PAT testing ! so a phone call to see if they are accepted would be prudent :) ]

 

You could take the hard drive out and format it and use it for extra storage for yourself.

 

We can explain further re. formatting etc if necessary.

[Porge]

Thanks very much for the advice.

 

I'll give all your suggestions a go.