While I'm still working on finishing breaking down the Emacs and IMacs that I got a while ago (a few months ago), I decided to take a look at the two older all-in-ones that I got. These older all-in-ones have easy access to the motherboard and drives. On the back, there were 2 or 3 screws that held a cover for the motherboard. Take the small back panel off and the motherboard pulls right out. The hard drive was also easy to remove through the back panel. The CD rom and floppy drives were easily accessed by popping off the front panel. The front panel is easily removed using the 'pry' slot on the bottom. All drives are in plastic cages. Just push in the plastic tabs and the drive and plastic slide out of the metal frame. After you remove the motherboards and drives, the easiest thing to do is put the covers back on and drop it off at your favorite monitor recycling place.
If you do that, though, there are some goodies you are missing out on. Inside the metal frame, there's some plastic connectors filled with gold pins (plastic connectors are about 12" long) that all of the ribbon cables are connected to. The only way I found to get those out was to disassemble the metal cage more, which means you better have a way to recycle the crt tubes. At that point, you might as well grab all of the copper, etc... from the monitor part.
Bonus - one of the motherboards (from the older model) had a gold cap motorolla cpu. I thought it was integrated into the motherboard since there was no lever, etc... to release the cpu, but it was just a push fit into the socket. I pulled the ceramic chip out and found the gold cap on the bottom. The more recent model had an integrated IBM cpu that couldn't be removed.
Note to self: Don't ever accept more of the emacs or imacs. I hate those things.
Bookmarks