There are three tech items at my house that are old and/or broken. Everyone knows that they shouldn’t be just thrown away. The amount of toxins in my stuff probably won’t hurt anything, but start multiplying that by everyone on my block, street, city, county, state”¦ it’s a lot of yuck that piles up really fast.
Mostly I just want to get rid of them. Here’s how I managed to make a little money out of it.
Here’s what I have:
- A Gateway laptop circa 2002 that could probably be refurbished with a reformat, though it would need a huge systems upgrade to be anywhere near the standards for a new computer today.
- A Creative mp3 player that cannot be resurrected. There are only so many times you can hit the reset button before you just have to give up and move on.
- A Samsung cell phone that’s only a couple of years old, but already severely outdated. It wouldn’t take much to activate it again, and other than normal wear and tear, it’s in pretty good shape.
Samsung SGH-A707:
- Cellforcash.com will give me $3 (they didn’t ask about the charger). However, ripoffreport.com has a lot of not very nice things to say about them, so I’ll pass.
- Gazelle.com will give me $4.
- I could sell it on eBay. There are already several phones listed, most of them for over $20. I might have some luck there. However, there are 10 or 15 of them on there, and none of them have any bids, so I think I’ll pass.
- Wired.yourenew.com says my phone isn’t worth anything, but that they’ll recycle it for me for free.
- Cellphonetradeins.com will give me $4.80. It has a few bad reviews at ripoffreport.com, but there aren’t many, and it’s such a small amount of money that I’m willing to risk it.
Creative Zen V Plus, 4GB
- Wired.yourenew.com says, “Sorry, your device is not worth anything, but we will recycle it for you for free.” I wasn’t expecting anything else. It’s not worth anything even if it was working.
- Gazelle.com says it doesn’t have any cash value.
- Strangely, cellphonetradeins.com accepts a lot of other electronics, so I looked up my mp3 player. Turns out that they’ll give me $0.36 for it. Score!
Gateway laptop 450SX4
At this point, I’ve decided I’m sending both the mp3 player and cell phone to cellphonetradeins.com. They buy laptops too, but my laptop isn’t listed.
- Wired.yourenew.com, cashyourlaptop.com, and gazelle.com either don’t have it listed or say it’s worth nothing.
- Cashforlaptops.com will give me $10, and they don’t have any stories about them at ripoffreport.com. It’s a deal.
At cellphonetradeins.com, I went through the process of selling my cell phone and mp3 player. It had an interesting password policy: if anything they recieve (computer, cell phone, etc) has a password that keeps them from accessing it, they reclassify the item as “broken” and the seller recieves no money. I can see how that’s necessary. I was also given the ability to receive payment via check or Paypal. But I could also donate my $5.16 to The Lance Armstrong Foundation, the Red Cross, and nine other charitable organizations. I prefer to give my money to someplace local, so I had them pay me via Paypal. Print the pre-paid shipping label and I’m done!
For the laptop, I gave my info to cashforlaptops.com and they’re expediting me an insured laptop mailer with prepaid shipping and a tracking number. All I have to do is pack it and drop it off at UPS.
It took a lot of shopping around, and I didn’t get a lot of money out of it, but the key thing is that I got rid of my old electronics that were just hanging around collecting dust. Whatever you do with your old stuff, just don’t throw it away!
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