What to do with old I MAC?

[japple]

My sister has an old I MAC 20" that she doesn't need anymore. She doesn't remember when she bought it, but it must have been in 2009 or so. What should we do with it? It would need to be scrubbed before we give it away.

[MiHale]

1. Guy I knew way back then...

Scooped out the case, all electronics gone, he waterproofed all the different places water could escape and made a fish tank.

[AllaN01Bear]

2. put linux on it and sell for cheep.

i have a older mac book pro that use for non online stuff.

[Eyeball_Kid]

3. Apple recycles their old products.

You can just give it to them if no one wants it. In any case, scrubbing the drive would be good. You can remove the drive from the 20 inch by removing the back, taking the drive out, and giving it a good soaking in a pot of water. You can also use software to wipe the drive clean if you are giving the machine away, but make sure that you are using software that makes your data unrecoverable.

[mitch96]

6. "You can remove the drive "I did that with my old mac and took a sledge hammer to it

Busted the disk up real good and then took it to the county recycler.. easy peasy..
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[wyn borkins]

4. Macs Are Good Nearly Forever...

Simply do what I did to my old MacBook Pro from mid 2009. I installed a solid state drive, then updated the software to OS X (El Capitan, Version 10.11.6) and now I have a fully-functional laptop that operates superbly.

[CloudWatcher]

5. Scrubbing the disk

Unless you've got state secrets on your hard drive, there's no need to physically destroy the disk.

Two reasonably safe options ...

1) Boot to "recovery mode" (cmd-r during boot) and use the "Disk Utility" in recovery mode to securely erase the disk. You can tell it to scribble zeros over the data blocks, not just a quick erase of the filesystem information. This will leave the "recovery partition" intact, but that's ok ... you don't have anything personal stored there.

2) Depending on iMac vintage, boot to "target disk mode" (hold down T during boot). This will turn the Mac into a big disk that you can plug into a second computer (e.g. another Mac) ... with an appropriate cable. Then you run Disk Utility on the 2nd computer to completely erase the disk of the other Mac. This can zero the whole disk, including the recovery partition. Slightly more complex than option 1 since you need the right cable and a second computer.

And it's not *that* hard to take an iMac apart and pull out the hard drive ... but you'll probably need a suction-cup puller to get the front glass off. And if you're going to go to that much work, you might as well put in a bigger disk and keep using it!

[wyn borkins]

8. Excellent Advice - HHD Destruction NOT Necessary (n/t)

[eppur_se_muova]

7. I'm still using an old iMac from 2006.

Of course it only runs System 10.7, but it works.

Admittedly, I don't use it that much, but it runs background jobs 24/7.

But hey ... send it to me ... (I'll scrub it myself, just to be safe, because I never reuse a drive w/out doing that.)