See if there's a local school or library that would take it.

And yes, do something to the drive that meets Secure Erase standards, possibly Boot & Nuke. Warning, though, DBAN is not necessarily ideal for the noob.

Is there a GoodWill computer center near you that takes donations?

I have 3 old hard drives, which I erased first, on a shelf in my garage. As technology advances, even DoD erasure standards may not be any good. Or maybe they will.

But I always donate or recycle old machines, sans hard drive.

Iconomy really really wants to know what kind of computer you got.

I got a new one last week, too! It's this one. It's a nice middle-of-the-road gaming PC.

The mister is using my old one (five years old) for his at home work computer (he's using it to VPN to his work PC). He also got a new computer, the same one I got. I dunno what he's doing with his old one (a home-made one, even older than my old one). I think he may set it up as a server. In any case, he is going to set them back to factory settings before he does anything else with them.

What he's done in the past, with old PCs, is clean them up and give them to Luddite friends just getting into computers.