Pay it forward - 'Giving' Ubuntu to Windows Users

[Derek Broughton]

Bart Silverstrim wrote:

> David Fox wrote:
>> 
>> Do you have a county computer recycling center (or school district)
>> in your area that might have use for them?
> 
> Just one side note about recycling to schools. Our school district
> does this, and I've complained in the past about schools being
> underfunded and understaffed as it is...but the number one problem
> we've seen with recycled systems is hard drive failure.
...
> Hard drives can go anytime, but statistically speaking we've seen a
> high failure of hard drives (20, 40, 60, 80 gig, often six or seven
> years old) from recycled systems.

Wouldn't it make sense to just _always_ install new drives?  I'm 
convinced that drive manufacturers carefully keep quality control to the 
point that most drives just barely outlive their warranties - the number 
of recently out-of-warranty failures I've had is astonishing, so you can 
pretty much expect that a drive in any recycled system is at end-of-life 
unless it's already been replaced.
-- 
derek