PORT TOWNSEND — Jefferson County is looking to streamline its recycling process for obsolete computers and office equipment, according to material presented at a county commission meeting Monday.
“In the past, we have tried to sell or auction our used computer equipment with very little success,” said County Administrator Philip Morley. cq
“With the financial situation and staffing cutbacks, it wasn’t worth using the staff time because of what we got in return.”
Morley said that in 2007 the county sought to auction a pallet full of old computers and received just one $25 bid.
Much of the equipment was so outdated that no schools or nonprofits wanted to take it from the county even as a donation, Morley said.
In 2011, the county fared a bit better, as 92 percent of the computers it tried to surplus were put into use in nonprofits, Morley said.
County Information Technology Director David Shambleycq now has standardized computer purchases, buying new equipment from Dell.
Prior to 2008, the county bought several hundred MPC-brand computers from Micron Electronics, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy that year.
These all-in-one units were unreliable, according to Shambley, and there are still a shelf full of components in the courthouse.
“You need two of these for anything to work — one to use and another to use for parts,” he said.
Some of the Micron computers are still in service, Shambley said, and about 60 percent of the county’s computers still use Windows XP, an operating system that was introduced in 2001.
The rest of the computers are using Windows 7, which is the newest Microsoft operating system on the market.
Shambley said it will probably take another two years to upgrade all county computers to Windows 7, and by that point, the next operating system will probably be in use.
Shambley said when the Micron computers were purchased, it was at a cost of around $1,500 per workstation, while the current cost is down to $900.
Over the next few years, the county expects to add “thin client” workstations that operate off networked hard drives and will cut the per-workstation cost in half.
One of the most important issues in the recycling or donating process is protecting the material on the hard drives, Morley said.
Computers used in county offices often contain personal information about county residents or passwords for county accounts.
There are two methods for the protection of this data.
If the computers are being sent to a reliable agency that is familiar to the county, the disk drives are reformatted using Department of Defense procedures where they are formatted and rewritten several times.
Even with this, a determined hacker can recover the material.
For agencies that are outside of the county’s comfort zone, the drives are “degaussed,” a magnetizing process that renders the disk drive useless.
Morley said receiving these donated computers is still a good deal for nonprofits, since the cost of replacing the hard drive can be as little as $50.
Shambley said all the available equipment has now been surplussed and expects more to become available during the fourth quarter of 2012.
“We want to make the surplus equipment available to nonprofit agencies at a time when they can use it,” he said. “With the schools, you don’t want to offer them equipment in the summertime.”
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Jefferson County Reporter Charlie Bermant can be reached at 360-385-2335 or charlie.bermant@peninsuladailynews.com.
