Its Christmas time and people are getting new computers and laptops. One thing that may come to mind is what to do with your computer. You may be asking yourself what should I do with my old desktop computer? Should I throw it away? The answer is no!

Follow up:

There are plenty of useful things that your old computer can do. Here is a list of alternatives to throwing away your old computer.

1 - Setup a Printer and Media Server

Old computers are great for this. You can easily setup an old computer to take care of tasks that your new computer does not need to. This will free a lot of processing on your new computer. I installed a terabyte hard drive on my old computer to store all of my music, pictures, and family videos which can be streamed and watched from my new computer and tv. That way my new computer does not have to be bogged down with lots of data.

2 - Donate it to a Local School, Organization, or Club

This is probably one of the most generous ways to take care of you old computer. It is said that your computer is pretty much obsolete after about two years but there are other people that could use it for more simple tasks.

You can also setup your computer to donate its resource and process time to scientific projects that benefit humanity. Check out my article about Distributed Computing.

3 - Sell it on Ebay

There are people that would buy your computer out there. Remember "One man's trash is another mans treasure" so set your computer at probably some where around $50 + shipping and see if you get some bids. If you know computers fairly well and would like to try some different tactics at Ebay you could see if selling the individual parts of the computer is better than selling it altogether.

4 - Recycle It

There are plenty of places all over the web that would love to take your computer off your hands and recycle it. Follow this link to find out how to recycle your computer. www.Newegg.com also offers a service to recycle computer parts.

5 - Give it to a Family Member or Friend

There are plenty of people out there that you probably know that could use a computer. Call your friends up and let them know you got a new computer and will sell or give them the old PC. After all after reading through all these options this one seems to be the best and most reasonable decision right?

There are many more things you can do with your old computer. I keep my old computers for parts that I may need to repair computers that people ask me to fix. This saves me and my customers money. Not only that, but it means less computers at the garbage dumps.