Ursa1 asks:How do you keep your used computer components from the landfill?

If you are just talking about components that are no longer used, I would keep them around just in case something went wrong.

If they are broken or dead, well, see if your local waste yard has a recycling program in effect. BTW, most computer recycling ends up in China in a small town that is now toxic because people expose themselves to the components of PC boards to extract the silver, gold, and lead.

If you have an old computer laying around, you can turn it into a very cheap Network Storage device using a great free program called FreeNAS. I have two old computers that each have four 500 GigaByte hard drives in them (2 TeraBytes each) for my multimedia. My main computer stays clean and all of my important data is on the network drives. Just do a search engine search on "FreeNAS".

Cheers

I know there are some programs also that ship older equipment to 3rd world countries you can look at doing that...

I like archstud's idea about rehabilitating the machines (and components) by assigning stand alone functions to them. Musicians can always use an extra midi sequencer I bet, and I'd wager that there are all kinds of other projects to keep the older machines productive.

I know it's really kind of old school and all, but an older computer still can handle simple data base and word processing tasks. We keep an old Pentium 3 in a corner of the dining room that we don't even have online to play older games and handle simple tasks.

We gave away our old computer parts to people who wanted them. Then we went to a second hand electronics store and gave them what they could sell. Then we took the rest to the recycling depot.