Computers recycled, time well-spent

I've been buying Mac laptops for more than a decade now, and am on my fourth. Two of the old ones were so beat up that their batteries no longer held a charge. One of them couldn't even be upgraded to the current operating system, so Safari and Chrome kept warning us not to use it because it was insecure.But I didn't want to just throw them out. And, of course, I needed to wipe them clean first.The newer of the two was from late 2008 and had been slow and getting slower for a long time. It took two afternoons to get everything deleted off it. I was amazed at how many little pieces of information there were in different places.I had documents, photos, music and video in various corners. Wifi connections from every conference I'd been to in a couple of years (I would occasionally delete old wifi addresses in there, but often forgot), as well as every family member's home. Chrome logins, Safari bookmarks, keychain logins.Both my sons and my husband also had accounts on that computer, so getting rid of my data wasn't the only issue. It took 20 minutes to delete my two sons' accounts after I'd deleted all the information in them.Like I said, the computer had gotten quite slow in past months.After two afternoons, all was done. A factory reset that erased the hard drive and started it from scratch made the computer shiny and new - at least on the inside.Then to deal with the older Macbook, which may date back to 2006 - 2007 at a minimum. After having figured out where all the data hid on the other computer, this one went a little faster, slow as the computer was. Then came the time for the factory reset.Not quite as simple as the first. This was made back in the day when the OS came on a CD-ROM and that was the only way to install it. We found startup discs from tons of computers from over the years - iMacs, PCs, laptops. We thought we finally found the one for that Macbook, but it refused to start up.So what to do?Time to get a little creative - I created a new administrator account, deleted the old admin account and voila. Not pretty, but served the same purpose.Maybe it wasn't as completely secure as the other, but there shouldn't have been any seriously important information on there anyhow.Today we took one to FedEx and one to UPS to go to different recycling centers - and we're even going to get a small Apple gift card as a reimbursement on the newer of the two. Even better, the computers and their components won't end up rotting away in a landfill, leaching down into the water supply.It all reminded me, though, that I need to do more than a bit of housekeeping on my current computers, because they're a mess.Photo by Luke Chesser via Unsplash.