How do I dispose of my old computer?

Alright, yr gonna need some supplies. 10 one-gallon ziploc freezer bags. One of them orange Home Depot buckets. Aporox. five pounds of wild bird seed. A box of expired Kraft Shells and Cheese dinner. One quart of synthetic motor oil. A pair of needle nose pliers. A nylon mesh dog collar. Probably a few old news papers or magazines. (Bonus points if they’re pages from an old SI Swimsuit Issue.).

First, equal quantities of the bird seed sealed in the ziplocs. And then pour the motor oil in the bucket. Make sure you’re wearing the mesh dog collar. Gotta put that on first. Now very carefully insert the needle nose pliers into your computer’s USB port. Goes without saying that all of this needs to be done atop the old magazines/papers you’ve laid out on the floor of your garage. You’re in your garage, right? Okay. Boil the water for the shells and cheese. Do not get the boiling water on your exposed genitalia. (You cannot be wearing pants while this is going down. Huge safety hazard.)

Okay, once you’ve crammed the pliers in the port you wanna grab the electronic ghost that lives inside the device. It’s very sneaky. Lure it out with the Mac and Cheese. Fucking ghosts love Mac and Cheese. Once you grab it you gotta move quick and put the ghost in the oil bucket to trap it. Don’t let the ghost go up your butt, or you’ll get possessed and you’ll have to get your pancreas defragged. Once the ghost is in the oil, consume the bird seed one bag at a time while singing “Hotel California” backwards.
 
Peen Simmons said:
Alright, yr gonna need some supplies. 10 one-gallon ziploc freezer bags. One of them orange Home Depot buckets. Aporox. five pounds of wild bird seed. A box of expired Kraft Shells and Cheese dinner. One quart of synthetic motor oil. A pair of needle nose pliers. A nylon mesh dog collar. Probably a few old news papers or magazines. (Bonus points if they’re pages from an old SI Swimsuit Issue.).

First, equal quantities of the bird seed sealed in the ziplocs. And then pour the motor oil in the bucket. Make sure you’re wearing the mesh dog collar. Gotta put that on first. Now very carefully insert the needle nose pliers into your computer’s USB port. Goes without saying that all of this needs to be done atop the old magazines/papers you’ve laid out on the floor of your garage. You’re in your garage, right? Okay. Boil the water for the shells and cheese. Do not get the boiling water on your exposed genitalia. (You cannot be wearing pants while this is going down. Huge safety hazard.)

Okay, once you’ve crammed the pliers in the port you wanna grab the electronic ghost that lives inside the device. It’s very sneaky. Lure it out with the Mac and Cheese. Fucking ghosts love Mac and Cheese. Once you grab it you gotta move quick and put the ghost in the oil bucket to trap it. Don’t let the ghost go up your butt, or you’ll get possessed and you’ll have to get your pancreas defragged. Once the ghost is in the oil, consume the bird seed one bag at a time while singing “Hotel California” backwards.
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Fuck it, I got 5 gallons of gas and a big back yard and no HOA.
 
Your local disposal station should have a recycling collection point for it...

That will be a lot less involved than Peen's solution, but probably not as enjoyable...
 
Bring it to Best Buy for electronics recycling. They take in old electronics. If you want to be sure that your data is cleaned off of it, pull the hard drive and put a hole through it with a drill press. Or a bullet.
 
I remove the drives and turn them into extra storage. For basic storage, exFAT format is compatible with Mac, Windows and Linux.

There are computer recycling centers near me. Also, my local Goodwill takes computers. I think they just hand them off to a recycling center.
 
Here is an example of a repurposed SATA HDD from an old laptop. It’s only worth about $15 but I hate to let things go to waste.

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I take them apart, put the hard drives on the stack of hard drives I already have, put the motherboard and i/o cards in my box of circuit boards, put the memory sticks in my box of memory sticks, put the cables in my box of cables, and put any screws in my jar or screws or a sandwich bag or the tray in my desk drawer.

Then I push all of that stuff around the basement for a minimum of 10 years.
Then I sort it all and re-box it to take it to the recyclers and instead push it around the basement for another 10 years.
 
As others have said, find a electronics recycling center near you. If that's not working, Staples will accept almost anything electronic for recycling. They'll even take CRT monitors, which can be difficult to get rid of.

Another option is look on social media for a charity in your area that specializes in refurbishing old PCs and providing them to folks in need. There are several places around here that do that. Many of them get bulk donations from companies refreshing their employees' workstations.
 
Bust buy ...just walk up to the customer service desk and tell them you have electronics to recycle and they'll take it off your hands. Iirc they have a limit on the number of items they will take in one shot but I've unloaded a bunch of old tech with them. I center punch hard drives or remove SSDs and bust them first.
 
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