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Is it safe to donate or give away RAM?

Question:

I have two 512 MB RAM memory sticks from an old computer running Windows XP.
Is it safe to give those cards to a charitable organization who could use them
to upgrade a computer? Is there anything from my computer that can be retrieved
from those? Are they even useful to anyone? I’d appreciate your opinion.

In this excerpt from
Answercast #72
, I look at how safe it is to donate or give away RAM and if
it can be useful for charitable organizations.

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Donate or give away RAM?

Absolutely, they can be useful. Feel completely safe giving them to an
organization that can use them.

RAM, by definition is what’s called “volatile,” which means that as soon as
you remove the power, everything that was in it is gone.

So what that means is… not only is the power to the computer turned off
before you remove it… but you’ve removed it. There is no power attached to
that RAM stick and therefore, there’s nothing stored in it.

So you can feel completely safe donating those RAM sticks to any
organization that might find them useful.

Can RAM sticks be reused?

Now, the use utility of those things of course depends on the computers
they have and the kinds of RAM that they need, and that’s fine. It will end up
kind-of being on their side to see if they can actually use it.

But in general, it’s a fine thing to do if you want to make use of those RAM
memory modules in some way other than just throwing them out.

End of Answercast 72 Back to – Audio
Segment

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