Disposing of old computers?

[Nebulous]

When its time to get rid of an old computer, how do you dispose of it?

Do you wipe or remove the hard-drive before? If you remove the hard drive what do you do with that? Smash it with a hammer?  

[Lurkerish Allsorts]

I do not believe I have ever thrown out a computer my self.
I tend to hold on to them, "in case I need to access the hard drive" or something.
For work we sell them to a recycling, much to my cringe as.. in the manner my work does it doesn't meet industry standard for security in my view.

For the hard drives (That is mechanical) , best practice is multiple DDoD 5220.22-M wipes from a program that support that, or better yet physical destruction of the hard drive.

SSD I'd go with just physical distraction of the device.

By destruction I mean breaking it in to tiny tiny tiny pieces for a hard drive you need to scratch the discs in the hard drive with sand paper or something just get all the scratches you can.

[SpookyZalost]

So as far as data recovery... if you want it to be difficult writing zeroes to it a few times effectively makes it a blank unrecoverable disk... sorta like running a magnet over a floppy.

if it's an SSD or M.2, well there was a time I used an old microwave for it MR robot style.  but these days I just use Hiren's boot CD with it's various disc utilities to go over the drive a few times and format until the recovery tool can't find anything.

as for the rest of the computer... you're better off holding onto it for a few years then putting it up on ebay... windows 98 PC's sell for two to three hundred dollars quite often now.

[Jane]

I’ve bashed the hard drive in with a hammer before now and poured bleach on it. Then the monitor has gone to the tip for the experts to dispose of.

[Kyng]

I don't dispose of my old laptops . I still have all three of my previous ones, going back to 2009... and I do still use them on occasion (to look up old stuff that I could never be bothered transferring, or just wanted another backup of), so I probably won't get rid of them any time soon!

[Nebulous]

In the past I've just thrown the whole tower in the trash. I'm paranoid so I'll throw the destroyed hard-drive away on the next weeks trash pickup so the computer and drive aren't together.