Part III: Donating Computer Gear

Since you are reading this web site, I will not waste your time by trying to convince you to give your old computer gear to charity, but instead will go on the assumption that you are already interested doing so, and want to know how. Or, perhaps, to whom. There are four basic things that you should protect in this process: the computer gear itself, the charity to which you are giving the gear, your own privacy, and your budget.

Choose the recipient

Many people have one or more charities in which they take an interest, and which they support on a regular basis. Perhaps your first choice for a recipient is your church, or a camp, or a rescue mission working in the inner city. But the charity you know best may not want what you have to give. Perhaps they already have something as good as or better than what you are replacing. Or perhaps you have a PC, but the charity has standardised on the Macintosh. (Or vice-versa.) You could ask around, but you may not have the time or patience to call different groups, trying to find somebody who wants what you have. There are ways to make the process easier.

First, there are resources, like Internet mailing lists or networking web sites (like this one) which are designed to help people who have computer gear to donate, and people who need computer gear, to find one another. These resources are listed in Appendix C. Second, there are charities which take old computers, fix them up, and pass them on, either to other charities, or to end recipients. If there is a suitable group near you, you can call them up, and they should take the equipment off your hands¹, and you won't have anything more to worry about. Appendix A is a list of computer refurbishing charities.

Protect the computer gear

You can start preparing to donate your computer gear the day you unpack it for your own use. The cardboard carton it came in and the styrofoam inserts padding it are the best way to protect computer equipment when shipping it. If you have any plans to ship the gear overseas, nothing you can come up with will protect the equipment as well as its original packaging. (Then, too, unless you have an on-site service contract, if you ever need to send the equipment back to the depot for service, most manufacturers require you to send it back in the original packaging, for the very reason of protecting it on the way back to the depot, and then back to you again.) Therefore, you might want to consider resisting the urge to do what most people do, which is to throw out all the packaging as soon as the equipment is installed, and instead store it away for future use.

Now, I do appreciate that keeping every carton for every piece of equipment you ever buy can use up a lot of space in a hurry, but computer equipment is more fragile than many other things, and also tends to get replaced more frequently than just about anything else in a home or office. (With the exception, in most cases, of a calendar.) So if even tricks like storing Christmas decorations or other little-used items in your computer equipment packaging don't work for you, you might want to consider donating the empty packaging to a computer refurbishing charity. Why donate empty packaging? Many "gift in kind" charities ship part or all of their goods overseas, and thus good strong cartons are one of the most needed items, and at the same time, those same cartons are rarely donated. In the best of all possible worlds, a computer refurbishing charity will have a computer to ship which exactly fits the packaging you donate. More likely, the styrofoam can be cut or broken down to act as padding between some other computer equipment and the sides, top, and bottom of a carton. And even cartons which are crumpled or torn can be used as padding, as is the case at Crossroads. (See the sections on "cigars" and packing in the Crossroads Computer Department Procedures Manual.)

Protect the charity

You may have read the news about Microsoft suing a computer refurbishing charity in Australia for copyright violation, because it could not produce licences for the copies of Windows on the computers it was giving away. Now, most computers come bundled with software, including the operating system, and frequently basic office automation software, such as a word processor, spreadsheet, and so on. In most cases, the people who buy new computers tend to lose or throw out items (such as the installation disks for the software, manuals, serial numbers, and software license certificates) once they have a system up and running, but those very items which go astray are the items which computer refurbishing charities (and, more critically, the end recipients) most need, if they are to be able to use the software with a clear conscience (and no fear of lawsuits), and to re-install the software if they have a hard disk crash or other problems. (And, when you buy a new computer, it mostly comes bundled with its own software anyway, so there is no point in hanging on to the software from your old computer.)

Therefore, I strongly recommend that you make a habit of keeping the installation disks, manuals, serial numbers, and license certificates together in a safe place, marked so that you can identify which documents and disks belong to which computer. Incidentally, this makes for good practice generally, even if you have no intention of donating the equipment when you replace it. For one thing, it allows you to prove that your software is legitimate, should you ever face a software audit. For another thing, it allows you to re-install your software easily in the event of a hard disk crash or similar catastrophe. And finally, it makes it easy to prove ownership to your insurance company in the case of theft or catastrophic damage. In fact, I recommend making up an equipment form for each computer, listing the serial numbers of the computer itself and its associated peripherals (such as the monitor, printer, scanner, etc.), the serial numbers or license keys of the software you have installed, and any other information which you find useful to track, such as the size of the hard drive and so on. You can keep one copy of this form on site, and another copy somewhere else, in case of catastrophic damage to your building. At Crossroads, we used the Computer Setup Checklist (which you can find in the forms section of the Computer Department Procedures Manual) to fulfil this function.

If you keep your documentation and install disks together, then you can give them away when you give the computer away, and that will make life much easier for the charity to which you give it.

There are some important exceptions to this general procedure:

First, if you work for a large organisation with many computers, it may be that the organisation buys computers which do not come bundled with software, and instead buys software directly from the developer using a "site license." This generally consists of one set of manuals and installation disks for that software, and the right to install that software on a set number of computers. In other words, the software is not associated with the computer, but with your organisation. In a case like that, you cannot give away the software when you give away your old computers, because the rights granted by the site license will be used on your new computers. In a case like that, you need to remove the software before you give the computers away, and alert the recipients that they will need to find and install new software themselves.

Second, if you own a software package, and then upgrade to a newer version of the same software by buying an "upgrade" version, then you cannot give away the original package to somebody else and keep the upgrade for yourself. The reduced price of the "upgrade" version is based upon the fact that you already own an earlier version. In a sense, your license for the new version is partially based upon the upgrade kit, and partially upon the original package, so you must keep both parts together. (Note: this does not apply to "competitive upgrades", where a vendor of a software package will offer a reduced price to users of a competing package in order to entice them to switch. In a case like this, the reduced price is an incentive to switch brands, and does not impair your right to give away the original package, although it may impair the recipient's ability to buy the same "competitive upgrade" that you did.)

Protect your privacy

One of the things which never ceases to amaze me is how people will give away functioning computers with hard drives crammed full of things nobody else should ever see. I got so tired of starting up donated computers and finding pirated software, or pornography, or viruses, or private, personal files, or confidential business information, that I made it a practice that one of the first steps in preparing a computer at Crossroads was to format the hard drive, wipe out everything, and start fresh. However, you cannot count on everybody being as decent and honest as I claim to be. It is best to protect your own privacy, because you cannot be sure that somebody else can or will protect it for you.

Before you give away a computer, you should delete all of your data files from it. In Windows, these files should be in the "My Documents" folder, and on a Macintosh, they should be in the "Documents" folder, but there could be data files in other places as well, including the folder where the application is, the desktop, and (all too frequently, although they aren't supposed to be there) the root directory.

If the computer is set up so that users must log in with a password before they can use it (which is the case if you have Windows, Linux, and some other operating systems), you should delete all profiles and passwords from the computer except for an "Administrator" or "root" account, change the password for that account to something painfully obvious (like "password"), and tape the username and new password to the outside and inside of the CPU case.

In addition, you should uninstall any applications which did not come bundled with the computer, and which you intend to use on the new computer. You should also check for personal information (such as names, addresses, and so on) in the configuration files for the software. (On a Macintosh, these should be in the "Preferences" folder. In Windows, they should be in the Registry, but some applications still use .INI files, and you should take a look through them with a text editor.)

There are some places where personal information can "hide." One is the settings files for your web browser and E-mail software. Both may contain things like E-mail addresses of you and your contacts, and possibly passwords for web sites you frequent. You should definitely empty out your address book, history, cache, and cookies.

And finally, once you have deleted or edited all the files which may contain sensitive information, you should use a utility to "overwrite" all the empty space on your hard drive. Most people don't realise that deleting a file, or even formatting a disk, does not actually remove the data. What happens is that there is a table near the beginning of the hard disk which keeps track of what files are on the disk and where to find them. When you "delete" a file, all your computer does is change that table to show that the space used by the file is now available to be used for another file. The data which actually makes up the file is untouched. It's something like cutting out part of the index of a book. The word originally referred to in the index is still in the book, even though it has been removed from the index, and anybody who has the patience to look through all the pages for that word will still find it. In the same way, people can use different utilities to find the contents of deleted files. However, there are utilities available which go through all of the "free" space on a disk, overwriting whatever is on the disk with nonsense. If you use one of these utilities, there is no way that anybody will be able to recover your data, short of taking your disk apart in a clean room and examining the disk surface with specialised equipment. Some of the utilities which can do this are listed in Appendix B. (Note: even if you reformat the hard drive, it is still possible to recover old data by using certain utilities. So even if you reformat the hard drive before giving your computer away, you should still use one of these utilities to ensure that your data is really gone.)

Protect your budget

One of the things which discourages many companies from donating their old computers is the fear that the recipient will keep coming back to the donor for "support", and the computers will keep being a drain on the IT budget, even after they have been given away.² If you are giving straight to an end-user, you need to make it clear that the equipment is given "as-is", and that they will have to look elsewhere for any questions they have about making it work. If you wish, you can point them to the assorted "support" resources listed in Appendix C.

However, I do need to make an important caveat to this general rule. When you give old equipment to somebody, it is only fair to ensure that you do not inadvertently put them into a "booby-trap" situation. For instance, Windows NT (and later versions of Windows based upon it, including Windows 2000 and Windows XP) and any operating system based on UNIX require a username and password to login. Without a username and password, the disk has to be reformatted, and all the software re-installed, if the recipient has the original software disks, or else, the recipient may be tempted to try to crack the password file and so gain access to the computer, in the process gaining one or more passwords which may still be in use on your systems. Therefore, if you do not intend to give away your software with the computer, you should reformat the hard drive, rather than giving it away "locked." (In the case of a PC, you can install something like DR-DOS, which is free, so that at least the recipient can turn the computer on and see that it works, even if they need to get other software to make use of it.) Other ways of turning a computer into a "booby trap" include locking the case, but not including the key to unlock it when you give away the computer, and setting up a password to prevent people from changing the BIOS settings. After all, your goal is not merely to clear out your storage space, but to do some good for the charity you are giving to. Therefore, when you give your computer away, please do ensure that the recipient will be able to have the access they need to fit it out for their use.

And finally, depending on where you are, the charity may be able to provide you with a receipt which you can use to reduce your income taxes. In Canada, a gift of goods rather than money is called a "gift in kind." The rules governing gifts in kind are spelled out on the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency web site, specifically pamphlet P113(E) Rev. 02 - Gifts and Income Tax and interpretation bulletin IT297R2 - Gifts in Kind to Charity and Others. In other words, in some situations, giving stuff away that you don't need can redound to your benefit.

Notes:

1. Most such groups have minimum standards for the equipment that they will take, so if your stuff is too old, they may not be interested in it. In such a case, you are still not "stuck with it", but it will take more work to find a willing recipient.

This is one reason that many companies prefer to donate through computer recycyling charities. The end user cannot ask the donor for support, because they don't know who the original donor was – at least not if all of the identifying data has been removed form the computer, and any corporate logos have been removed from the case. You can find a list of computer recycyling charities in Appendix A.

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[Introduction] [Part II: Receiving Donated Computer Gear] [Part III: Donating Computer Gear]
[Appendix A: Organisations] [Appendix B: Software] [Appendix C: Resources] [Appendix D: Bibliography] [Appendix E: Computer Vendors] [Appendix F: Sample Documents] [Appendix G: Media Links]