Intro

Hello all,

I am Steve; new to the forum but have been reading it for a few months now. I have been playing with computers since the fourth grade (35 now), and professionally been in IT for 15+ years now. Also have a background in steel fabrication; family business which has since closed. I have always had a ton of clients that needed to discard their e-scrap, and so I have now been venturing into this area. I lease a 3-400 sq. ft area in town now, went through the DEP blessing and have also been recently endorsed by the city as an e-waste facility. Starting off very small though, but hope to grow in time. I still have my own IT business part time and work full time for an IT services firm... too much to do...

Though strongly familiar with systems and components, I am still learning the grading and sorting process. This forum is great for this information and I appreciate any help along the way. If I can help in any way please ask me. One area I may be of assistance; refurbishing systems. I have worked extensively with brokers for moving large volumes of refurb equipment and in charge of the lab that tested them. My RMA rate was less than 1% yearly, in which most cases it was user error and the equipment tested fine upon return to us. I have developed fast efficient ways to test equipment and also clone machines. I have a hard time investing hours into a machine that may yield a $50 return, so have found ways to maximize this process if anyone has interest. Glad to trade off my service experience with recycling experience.

Three things I question to begin with re: efficiency and returns on effort; Maybe you can all chime in on these...

- Printers - Seem to be one of the least worth items to obtain for the effort involved. At this point, for the 30+ minutes it takes to clean one up responsibly, you get a few tiny boards and possibly a cartridge you can resell as empty. Where is the value in printers? Otherwise, I can sell them whole for 0.04-0.06 a lb...
- Flat Panels - Same applies here; besides the small gold finger board inside and a few ounces of wire...
- CRT's - All options here? I currently charge $0.25 lb to take them and have to pay out $0.10 to discard them locally to a larger facility. I do not care to break them open as it opens a huge can of worms with the DEP to do so...
- CDROMS/Floppy's - Can fetch I believe $0.18 lb whole for these, boards, plastic and metal all gone, no effort. Is it worth breaking them down for boards alone? I am then left with time invested, plastic and metal which doesn't fetch me anything currently. I currently "donate" my shred metal to my landlord in exchange for use of the trash dumpster. He also has a metal dumpster on-site so it's convenient. In time, I will get my own when I hit those volumes, but the trade off is fine for now. He may get $90 a mo/ tops for the metals I toss in the dumpster, cheaper then $130 bi-weekly for a trash dumpster.
- Finger cards - also, is it really worth the extra effort to separate the gold trim?

Time efficiency is a HUGE deal to me, in some cases on the service side I can fetch $50-$150/hr.. so in some cases, it may fetch a few more cents to break things down more, but if I have to invest hours to do so...not sure it's THAT worth it... it's more about dollars per hour for me than a flat payout for a million hours invested. Otherwise I would stick to the full time job. Volume and efficiency seem to play the biggest role in this business... unless it's just for extra money. I want this to grow and create jobs etc... so I take it pretty seriously.

Thanks all!

I appreciate the reply, thanks.

The best free tool I use for password removal, and is typically safe, is a tool called the Trinity Rescue Kit, or TRK. Easy Google search and you will find the main site; it's been a opensource project for some time and it works well. Basically, you would download the ISO image, burn to cdrom...then boot the system in question with the cdrom and it will load this cd. I am not sure how saavy you are with systems, but if you get stuck just ask me...

Once it boots up, to basically it's own operating system (Linux Flavor), it will have an option to use the password removal tool called "winpass". This tool, or command really, has many options, but I would just run it from the main menu to start with, option 3 possibly?... This will then search the disk(s) installed, mount the OS and allow you to remove the password completely. The site also has a bunch of How-to's to get you going, but it's fairly straight forward once you get comfortable with it. This program should work for most windows operating systems and also Linux too I recall.

For wiping drives, it depends on what level you consider securely wiped and tested. For testing purposes, a used drive to me falls into three categories, each with different levels of time/effort/expense. If you can do a low level format on a drive and it passes without errors, and is also not a noisy drive, then typically in most cases it's going to last a while and a decent one to resell as used. A very minimal amount of these tested this way will fail within a year based on my past experience. Now, the way I used to test was much stricter for certain companies, but "true" testing requires a software package that can put stress on the drive, read and write the entire drive, and requires the drive to run an hour or more (sometimes overnight for one pass) to complete. Software for this I have not used in years and it was also designed for high end server drives, Like Sun Microsystems etc, not Windows. SiSoft Sandra used to be a decent stress testing software for Windows, not sure as of late.

As far as cloning goes, Acronis is your best friend on many levels, including backup of your systems for the business. Buy yourself a cheap NAS drive @TB or so.. plug it into your network, create a shared drive folder, and start building an image database for yourself. Acronis take a full snapshot of an entire system, everything, and backs it up to a single (large) file. If I am building out machines, I build one from scratch, install all patches, etc...then image it with Acronis to my NAS drive. I save the file as the machine type, for example, DELL_INSP_4200_XP_PRO. I now have a standard profile build for any dell inspiron 4200 systems I received. Then I plug in all the systems, say 5 at a time, boot all of them with a copy of acronis, point the acronis to the nas image for those machines, and let them restore. Same copy, standard, and fast. Like 15 minutes to restore a system. So if you had 5 of the same machine, you built one in 2 hours or less and 4 more in about 15-30 minutes, and now also have a machine profile on file for next time you get that machine type. Windows must be restored to a machine with the same architecture or it will blue screen on you. Typically it's mainly based on the motherboard and chipset type. I prefer to only invest time into Dell's mainly, they are extremely common and easy to install. Trying to find restore cds for a sony, toshiba etc is a pain. I just boot those quick, and then strip for parts on ebay. Having just one Dell restore cd can restore many many different dells (need drivers afterward), but they are easy. Other Dells just have a hidden clean restore image already on the drive which can be invoked with a cd at all; it will roll the system right back to factory setup.

I can ramble...I know...

Wiping... different standards for this, but for a safe general wipe that's not too time consuming.... Let me back up, to explain a bit more about drives and their data; the concern for security on drives is high today...

Drives have space, we use it, data is stored there. When we delete something, it doesn't go anywhere, it stays right on the drive. Only one thing happens when you "delete" a file. That file, say a picture, is stored normally as this picture viewable to you on the system. This file that is still in use is marked in the background (on the drive) as an occupied space on the drive in use with a "1". 1 meaning, when there is new data to be written to this drive, do not write data in this space, or any space marked with a "1". You delete this picture. The picture is now marked with a "0". So now this space is available to be written to at any time (or possibly never at all?) So the data is still there physically, just not accessible to anyone easily (I have means to recover this by the way)... Anyways, so the data is never truly removed, it's just allocated as new space to use in the "free space" pool. So say you save a new file, and it overwrites this previously use space for your picture. It is STILL not gone... The DOD and others claim that data can be recovered from a drive that has been over written up to like 13 times or so.. it's a lot... and can still be recovered...So truly, the only way to wipe a drive and still have it usable is the following...

Mount or install the drive as a secondary one in an existing booting system.
Then perform a full (not quick) format on the drive
Then run a tool called Ccleaner (free) with the settings to securely erase the entire drive. There is many settings for this, but I use the setting that does at least 15-20 passes. it can do up to 35. A pass is where this program will write fake data on the entire drive in every sport, then do it again, etc... up to 35 layers deep. There is no equipment I am aware of that can recover data from any drive that has been passed at least 12+ times..

In a nutshell though, you can see the time involved in this whole refurb process to do things in a compliant way. I am the thorough type, so compliance is an issue for me. A lot of guys make a lot more sales than me for certain items, but it's because I will not invest that amount of time into something with such a small margin. I could easily spend 10 minutes on a used system and make it appear to be cleaned, but it's not. I would make more money for certain, but now I am out of compliance. I try to find creative ways to make a good rate with minimal time and the least amount of headaches. I could pump out a ton of refurb systems rather fast in some cases, but now, do I want to take the calls when the end user does something wrong and I have to hand hold them through the whole process of convincing them in a polite way that its not OUR equipment, it's you? lol...service sucks and swallows up profits. I would rather make 25-50 on a system board alone then 75-125 on a system all day long. Its just a part, so it works or not, not much to support there. But, you sell a solution, a system, and now it increases risk to support and for returns or unhappy people.

I'm ranting, but mainly pouring out my experience over the years. My weakness has always been marketing, not so much tech stuff...and I am glad to share and help any way I can. If you can deal with the rants and jumping all over the place

-Steve

Haha! Love it man Welcome to SMF! I have a copy of ERD commander for passwords, it's old but still works on all I've tried. Need to locate my Acronis for cloning some of the newer systems(in the past i've usually just used a manufacturers disk). I prefer the low level format too, or even use a Partition Magic to change the file structure a time or two.
I think in your case the simple pull and sort would work best for time's sake, all that trimming and such is iffy at best from what I've read here. I broke down over 20 old old dot matrix printers today, just grabbing the boards, print heads, and transformers, and snapping them back together with most of the metal still in there, hoping to get by with mixing them in with the computer cases. Printers, I think most guys(or gals) here just grab the cartridges and toss in the shred(light metals) pile, but it'll need be a good mix of mostly metal.
Thanks for the tip on the Dell rescue(glad I saved a copy), need to try that
Marketing isn't so bad when you like what you do, you do it well, and you have people waiting in line to get one ; )

Originally Posted by PartTimeScrapper

welcome aboard. Did I just get a class in refurb 101. From one computer geek to another welcome to the forum.

Lol. Quite possibly (or not)... I have no clue in a forum how to read who knows what etc so I tend to rant. Another geek quality... I just try to help and when I reply to things I try to be thorough for everyone who may come across it. Clients sure as hell can't appreciate how much work it is to learn and refine tech skills amd processes so if I can help a fellow colleague why not

Originally Posted by Bear

Haha! Love it man Welcome to SMF! I have a copy of ERD commander for passwords, it's old but still works on all I've tried. Need to locate my Acronis for cloning some of the newer systems(in the past i've usually just used a manufacturers disk). I prefer the low level format too, or even use a Partition Magic to change the file structure a time or two.
I think in your case the simple pull and sort would work best for time's sake, all that trimming and such is iffy at best from what I've read here. I broke down over 20 old old dot matrix printers today, just grabbing the boards, print heads, and transformers, and snapping them back together with most of the metal still in there, hoping to get by with mixing them in with the computer cases. Printers, I think most guys(or gals) here just grab the cartridges and toss in the shred(light metals) pile, but it'll need be a good mix of mostly metal.
Thanks for the tip on the Dell rescue(glad I saved a copy), need to try that
Marketing isn't so bad when you like what you do, you do it well, and you have people waiting in line to get one ; )

I appreciate it thanks. What do prInt heads fetch? Do you break them down further or sell than as is? I've been tearing them apart, found its a lot of effort for basically nothing it seems. But, at least I'm learning more about the anatomy of a printer... They did have a donor card anyway...

Speaking of printers; came across two Texas Instruments ABT1600 itinerary printers. They used to print tickets for airlines. They were functioning when I grabbed them. Been researching a market for them, apparently very expensive equipment. Brokers want 1k just for the memory. Thinking someone may want the two as is for a fair unload price. Any printer refurb guys here you know of? Would be freight though, heavy things...

Glad to help if I can

Originally Posted by Freesourcetech

I appreciate it thanks. What do prInt heads fetch? Do you break them down further or sell than as is? I've been tearing them apart, found its a lot of effort for basically nothing it seems. But, at least I'm learning more about the anatomy of a printer... They did have a donor card anyway...

there's some little gold boards in some of them http://www.scrapmetalforum.com/scrap...-printers.html most of mine had those size ones (maybe 2in sq) plus some Al, a hefty lil transformer, a 3x10ish motherboard grade board, bits of wire and a small motor, and some neat little push rods(punches) from the rollers. I left metals as much as possible, plus getting tired of it and didn't even strip the last ones, but still filled up a good sized tote with over a hundred pounds of the assorted mix I just described for separating on another day. Will be good to get rid of that stack of old printers though