InternetNews: Old PCs a Growing IT Headache

I ran across this article on Internetnews.com today. It talks about the woes of getting rid of end-of-life PCs. As the growing threat of corporate espionage looms, and as data recovery tools become cheaper and more widely available to everyone -- criminals included, IT departments are faced with some tough decisions on what to do with old hardware.

On a side note, most places I've worked at have come to the conclusion that media (hard drives, floppies, backup tapes, old CDs and DVDs, etc) should be destroyed securely by a company like Iron Mountain, and the PC should then be auctioned as surplus without any media. License keys that are affixed to cases are also removed and/or destroyed. The good news with this solution is that people like us can score hardware that's sometimes less than 5 years old, for next to nothing if the stars are aligned correctly.

How to host a website on an old PC

This Page goes into pretty good detail about what all you need to run your own web server using one of your older computers laying around.

Keep in mind, the page that hosts this information IS running on an old PC, and it hit the Digg Front Page. This poor old computer is certainly getting a workout!

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. Not only am I pretty much out of functional 80s- and 90s-era computers of my own to write about, but work is catching up to me right now, and I don't have a lot of free time.