Reducing, Reusing & Recycling your electronic devices
Do you have old IT kit at home or perhaps in the office and you don’t know what to do with it? We say, donate it. There are many charities that will reuse your old tech. Here we explore how to prepare your computers for donation.
Steps to take if it is a personal computer
So, you’ve decided to donate your old computer. Well done you! It’s highly likely that when you got a new piece of kit, you left all data, photos etc on your old computer. Now is the time to back up your entire system. A backup is an essential step in case you need to revert the changes for any reason. Also, a file backup will be useful to keep a copy of all your files that you can then restore on another device. You can back up by using a hard drive and copying all of your information onto it, you can use OneDrive which will store all your data in the cloud. We recommend both if you are super cautious. Go to ‘Control panel – system and security – back up and restore’.
Once you have a back up, you can move onto the next step.
The next step is to erase everything and restore factory settings. You can do this by Open Settings -Click on Update & Security – Click on Recovery – Under the Reset this PC section, click the Get started button – Click the Remove everything button – Click the Change settings option – Turn on the Data erasure toggle switch – Click the Confirm button – Click the Next button – Click the Reset button. This process can take hours but it is worth it. You need to ensure that the hard drive will be wiped out beyond recovery, removing your files, accounts, settings, and apps. Windows will then apply a fresh installation.
Once the above is complete, you are ready to send your old kit onto its new home. There are many charities that accept old laptops and pc’s including Computer Aid. They will check the laptop to ensure any data is shredded before they update it or add any programmes to it.
Techrelate supports Computer Aid as they have brought access to technology to over 14.5 million people. There are of course smaller charities to support, such as WEEE Charity.
Steps to take if you are a business with items to donate
No matter how many items you have, the important thing is to give it a new lease of life whether that is reusing the cables, plugs or disk drives. The aim is to prevent avoidable waste electronics going to the bin. We recently collected 4 servers, 6 laptops, 2 PC’s, 1 switch, 1 router and 1 phone from our clients. To ensure data security on the computers, we use KillDisk, a specialist software that meets the British military standard (HMG Infosec Standard 5). KillDisk writes over the data 7 times – that effectively destroys all files from recovery. If you would like this service, please contact us. We can share the destruction certificate with you to give you peace of mind.
Once we are sure that no files can be recovered, we arrange collection with our monthly IT recycling company which will take the items for reuse elsewhere.
Email help@techrelate.co.uk for further information.