First huge (to me) ewaste pickup

Made my first big ewaste pickup yesterday. I know for some of you this is small potatoes, but you gotta start somewhere. Lol. My wife's uncle refurbishes laptops as a side gig. A little while ago I made a facebook page advertising my services for free pickup. He got a hold of me and had me come grab what scrap/not worth repairing ones he had. Most of them are incomplete. But I have enough to keep me busy for a while and hopefully make a couple bucks. Total of 35 laptops and a box of misc stuff. With more coming in a couple weeks.

Good start ! Congrats

It is a good start, especially for free. 35 laptops are a good 150 lbs, depending on your buyer that could be about $150 just in scrap value right there. But before you scrap anything do a bit of research to see if there are greater than scrap value items in the lot. Sometimes one single item could be worth as much as the rest of the entire lot.
As you put the word out there, and make more contacts, you will get more frequent pick ups.
I just got a similar lot to yours a few days ago, about 80-100 laptops, plus some desktops also. Spent yesterday afternoon going thru it all. For better than scrap items found about 6 decent laptops, 1 good desktop, 15 or so SATA laptop hard drives, and about 20 sticks of laptop RAM. These items will easily double to triple my profits compared to just scrapping everything.

It's definitely some weight. Laptops are nice and light, that is until you haul a couple boxes worth up 20 stairs. Lol. Most are far from complete. About a quarter are just the mobo and frame, no screen. Most have no ram. 50/50 on hard drives. Only a few batteries. Took apart 5 last night, got 3 processors. He's been refurbing for 10+ years so I'm gonna assume he knows mostly what's worth resale and takes it. Not to say he won't miss anything, but also right now space is limited so I don't really have any room for "hold it til it sells". Haven't broken down too too much yet, but already starting to feel the "all this plastic" experience everyone always complains about. Lol. I have recycle bins in my condo dumpster corrals though. So at least it won't be trash.

Whoa.. hold on there . Do I see some Panasonic Toughbooks in that pile ? Those are awesome machines CF 30 and better if you can get them running are great machines !
Many have lighted keyboards, GPS, touch screens , batteries that last "forever" Very cool machines. Drivers available for Windows 7. Ant these a tough as hell- the military use them as do the police and many people doing field work. They a re easy to work on and many U- tube videos about how to swap out parts .
Have fun hopefully you can get one going to play with. I recently got 14 of them in a load- one was a CF29 missing parts, the rest needed to be cleaned up and refurbed. Did that, sold six, selling 5 more keeping one for myself !

Is that a Powerbook G4 in the box? What model?

some people have all the fun, don't know anyone who does repair stuff, was trying to reclaim precious metals for jewelry, what a mess, the schools and businesses auction stuff off, and these government auctions i think they can figure out down to a penny what scrap value is, i have gotten 40 cisco ip phones for a dollar a phone no power units, all the nuke missel bunkers have been sold so to get older stuff are we gonna haveta get digging for those old console tv's

Lucky you that's a good looking haul.

Kalvlin - you are correct. Those are about 15 or 20 toughbooks. Not looking at them as I type this, so not sure of any exact models. But they vary from one another and they're all in different conditions of incompleteness. If you or anyone else would be interested in one or many, pm me for details and we can discuss a deal. I'd be willing to work a deal that's a bit above scrap value but still leaves something for you. However, resale isn't a goal of mine til I have more room to keep an inventory. Right now my process is turn and burn.

Sledge - thanks for the stamp of approval. Lol. I like them too. As a part timer, I don't look at dollars/hour. I only look at the dollars. Nothing more relaxing than some deconstruction, especially when it puts a few bucks in your pocket. And you can tell all those other ewasters, if they don't want their laptops, send em my way. My tools are hungry. Lol.



Unknownk - it WAS a g4. Model a1138. However, it was only the screen and mobo. Now it's parts in their designated piles.