Do you have a Ziploc bag full of old cell phone chargers in a junk drawer at your home? What about old desktops and laptops? Are they stored somewhere in a closet or attic? When it comes to your computer and network equipment, we find it should be a priority to dispose of old equipment properly - keeping them organized and inventoried. In your spring cleaning, don’t forget your network resources! Your file system and shared drives need a little TLC sometimes too. We are here to help! We have helped many customers in Columbia, Lexington, West Columbia, Irmo, and all over the Midlands of South Carolina with proper disposal and inventorying of all of their computer and networking equipment as well as freeing up valuable space on their servers and devices.
I’ve identified what needs to go, now what?
Electronics dumped at our owner’s family farm.
Can we simply just drop things off on the side of the road? Certainly, we shouldn’t drop them off at a nearby piece of land. See pictured to the right our owner’s experience when he went to enjoy some time on his family farm recently. You are not able to drop them off at the curb to go to the landfill. There are options for you though!
Just the other day, a customer in Irmo, SC asked, “How much does it cost and what should I do about recycling some of our old computers?” The great news is that there is a local, free solution to this problem (since electronics and related equipment can no longer be sent to landfills with typical garbage services)!
Fortunately, the city of Columbia offers an e-waste recycling drop-off service located in downtown Columbia. All for free! There you can drop off all of your old computers, televisions, monitors, printers, fax machines, and other related equipment for safe recycling and disposal.
The address for the drop-off location is 2910 Colonial Dr, Columbia, SC 29203.
How do I figure out what to get rid of?
IT closets can be overwhelming for sure! The Seras Team often sees machines worth keeping and machines that stopped working 15 years ago. The hard part is always letting go… and trying to figure out what you should keep for future use, what might hold protected or critical data, and if it is generally OK to get rid of something unusual.
Unfortunately, there is no magic list that we can provide; however we can provide a couple of starting points:
remove hard drives and have them shredded using a certified shredding vendor
keep memory sticks that are 4gb or larger for future PC upgrades
keep PCs with i5 processors or newer - especially if they are already loaded with Windows 10
Remember that it is often easier to knock down a house and re-build than to re-model an existing one… older machines often need exploratory work, troubleshooting with trial-and-error parts replacement, and software changes and upgrades. With new PC costs dropping everyday, it is typically much more practical to replace equipment than to attempt to refurbish it. Consider the labor involved in refurbishing, the parts that may need to be ordered, the time spent researching and ordering parts, and potential downtime for future users when they experience problems associated with older equipment.
Can I clean up my electronic closets too?
Computers store all types of information, similar to a court stenographer that can spit out conversations from years ago that took up space in a county vault. Often the conversations between the Bailiffs do not need to be retained, but they may be anyway. Computers operate in a similar fashion, holding on to activity log files, cookies, items in the recycle bin, and much more in many different places. Windows offers a disk cleanup function that is easy to use and helps remove some of these older files and folders, but the real cleanup should take place on a larger level…
Think of all the places a business may have files, folders, emails, images, and other data that is no longer needed. An intentional, decisive approach to cleaning up stored files often leads our customers to enhanced efficiencies within their organization - in addition to freeing up space and protecting critical data that has reached it’s expiration date.
We are here to help
Feeling overwhelmed? Don’t be! We are here to help! Businesses all over Columbia, West Columbia, and Lexington all trust in us to help them remain organized and efficient when managing their computer and networking resources.
A customer’s networking rack before and after we came in and helped them organize it.
