Personal Dork Assistant

Recyclables

I consider myself fairly frugal when it comes to hardware acquisitions, for a tech-whore, anyway. However, you can't really get out of the way of the planned obsolescence, and the old gear do start to pile up. It's even held up upgrade plans as we've kept dad hobbling along on an old Rev. A Smurf G3 PowerMac, slightly augmented with a 900MHz CPU upgrade (ooooh). Really should get him something faster but hate to throw away a (barely) serviceable machine. Apple does offer a recycling program, but only if you buy your new computer directly from the Apple store (i.e. take the sales tax bite). Dell only offers recycling of old Dell junk, which should be enough keep them plenty busy but that doesn't help me any.

So I was excited to see the news that Staples, of all people, is offering $10 recycling of anything electronic to all comers. They even promise not to just dump the junk in China like your typical electronics disposal/recycling shop. Not sure how Staples can make it work for $10 an item, but it certainly raises them up a few notches in my estimation, for what that's worth.