Apps that just hit the market are always appealing because they're new and exciting, but some of the old standard apps are getting updates that keep them ahead of the competition. We take a look at the biggest and best app updates to come available this week.

There are a ton of new apps leaking into every app marketplace, trying to vie for position and make itself a contender in its respective category. This gives existing app creators good reason to keep up with updates and offer up new features whenever possible. We see tons of new updates becoming available every week, and its easy for them to pass by without much notice. Here’s a collection of updates that you won’t want to skip. 

Skype for Android (Version 3.0)

Smartphone owners that default to Skype for video or audio calls aren’t going to notice any changes right when they open up the application, but odds are good a sudden understanding will strike during a crystal clear call. Skype has reworked some of the internals of its app, adding a new SILK codec that is designed specifically for the human voice and optimizing call quality based on connection speed. A new login option for Microsoft account users has been added in preparation for Skype’s takeover as Microsoft’s default chat option. Finally, tablet users will enjoy a new layout that makes use of all the screen space available with a two column layout. Seven-inch tablet owners beware, though, as Skype 3.0 locks into landscape layout while your camera likely requires a portrait alignment. It can create for some neck pain.

Runkeeper for Android (Version 2.14.1.1)

Runkeeper serves to encourage people to keep running, which is no easy task. Now in its latest update, its encouraging running with a partner, even if it’s just digitally. Social features like the Friends tab now offers interaction between you and your fellow cardio-centric friends. Facebook integration will bring your contacts to you, and there’s an in-app messaging system that allows you to send words of encouragement–or taunts–to your friends. Your friends will also show up on a leader board, creating a little competition for your circle of runners. The activities page has also gotten an update and a new tab-style navigation system will help users get around in the app.

Amazon for iOS (Version 2.3.1)

Tis the season to do your shopping. That’s what Amazon believes at least, as its latest app update is focused on giving consumers more access to enticing offers. The latest iOS update for Amazon, version 2.3.1, brings push notifications for item shipping and arrival times, letting users know exactly where their purchases are. There’s also a daily alert option that will give you Amazon’s listing of Lightning Deals for that day. The iPad version of the app also got a nice new feature, allowing users to check out product images and descriptions up close with a pinch and double tap to zoom feature.

Nokia Transport for Windows Phone 7 (Version 3.1 beta)

Not content with launching a brand new iOS app, Nokia decided to do some tweaking to its existing apps as well. The improvements come to beta version 3.1 for its Windows Phone 7 app, Transport. The app has always been designed for the commuter in mind, and now a segmented map will make navigation easier. More detail will be available in each individual leg of a journey, so users can get a closer look at their surroundings in the app. There’s also a new countdown feature that will let public transportation users know when the next bus or train is scheduled to arrive. It essentially does what Transport (also known as Transit) 3.0 does on Windows Phone 8 devices but on an older operating system.

Sparrow for iOS (Version 1.3.3)

Sparrow users that own an iPhone 5 can finally get proper use from the email app, as version 1.3.3 for iOS optimizes the app for the iPhone 5′s bigger display. Further improving the app is a feature that allows it to open Passport-specific documents. Essentially, the update brings Sparrow up to speed for iOS 6 and makes it completely compatible with the latest offering of Apple devices it calls home. The email client has been neglected a bit by its owner, Google, since being purchased in July of this year, so the sudden attention is welcome and will hopefully continue.

While the LG Nexus 4 has sold extremely well and received a ton of positive feedback, it seems that it isn’t without a few problems as well. New reports are starting to arise regarding Issue 39936 on Google’s website, which pertains to listening to an earpiece on the Nexus 4. More specifically, so far 135 users claim that while using an earpiece, there is a very faint buzzing and clicking.

Clearly, given that more than 135 people bought a LG Nexus 4, it is not affecting everyone, at least not enough to complain about it. However, after you just shelled out $300+ any little bug is annoying enough.

The main concern seems to be that the sound is coming from the earpiece which sounds like it is always on. Therefore, battery drain could become a problem with this part of the phone running 24/7. So far Google has yet to address the problem, even on the forum. This leads us to believe that the issue is minor or Google has already begun work on a fix.

With the Nexus 4 currently out of stock and ‘coming soon’ back to the Google Play store, hopefully Google and LG will be able to work out a quick fix. Usually, problems as small as this stem from software and not manufacturer error by LG. Are you experiencing buzzing or other noise problems with your Nexus 4? Let us know in the comments below and report it on the Android Issues website here.

Possibly a great way to keep gadgets charged without increasing the power bill, the Electree+ solar charger combines cool design with green technology.

Recently launched on Kickstarter, the Electree+ is a small, bonsai-sized tree sculpture with solar panels attached to the ends of each white plastic branch. The 27 silicon solar panels on the Electree+ are adjustable based on the placement of the device and the direction of sunlight. Ideally, the device should be placed in an area that’s always in the path of sunlight during the day. According to the creator of the Electree+, it takes a day and a half to completely charge up the 14,000mAh internal battery to full power. 

However, if someone simply wants to recharge their smartphone, the Electree+ can collect enough power to accomplish that task in approximately four hours.

When the battery has a full charge, the Electree+ can recharge an Apple iPad 2 twice, a Samsung Galaxy S III seven times or an Apple iPhone 5 nine times before requiring more sunlight to fill up the battery again. The Electree+ comes with two USB ports for recharging digital cameras, tablets, laptops, smartphones, wireless headphones or any other form of portable electronics. 

In addition, the Electree+ includes a Qi wireless charging zone underneath the tree to avoid having to search for the correct USB charging cable. iPhone owners can also take advantage of wireless charging assuming they purchase a Qi-enabled case. Beyond wireless charging, an Electree+ owner can upgrade the device with a NFC chip that can be used to trigger specific actions when a NFC-enabled smartphone is placed on the Electree+. For instance, when an Electree+ owner returns home from work and places the smartphone down on the charging area, a text message could automatically be sent to family members notifying everyone that they are home. 

Within the base of the Electree+, the battery is stored underneath the baseplate and acts as the base of the tree design. After the plastic trunk is attached, the user attaches the three main branches that each house nine solar panels on smaller branches.

Since the two USB ports are underneath the baseplate, the creators of the Electree+ have designed the plate to allow for two USB cords to exit the device in order to reach a tablet or smartphone. According to the creator, the Electree+ will come in multiple colors and the baseplates will come in multiple colors. 

Regarding the production schedule, the team building the Electree+ plans to use January 2013 to make small tweaks to the design before submitting the design specifications to a manufacturer based in the United States. During February and March, the team will be working to the manufacturer to perfect the prototype and complete the final molds before authorizing full scale production of the Electree+. During April 2013, the team will perform quality assurance tests on the device and make sure wireless charging works correctly. 

The team plans to ship the Electree+ solar charging device to Kickstarter backers during May 2013 assuming the full $200,000 is raised. The minimum cost for an Electree with wireless charging and NFC capabilities is $260. Anyone that wants color options will have to pay at least $325 for the solar charging device. 

Digital Trends sits down with Randy Pitchford to talk about developing a proprietary engine to bring the world of Aliens: Colonial Marines to life. Plus: Gearbox's president on the future of video game consoles.

Randy Pitchford had a good year. In the thirteen years since founding his studio, Gearbox Software has never had a hit quite like Borderlands 2, one of the best selling and widely praised video games to come out in a very crowded year. What’s more his studio’s long labor of love, Aliens: Colonial Marines, is just three months away from release after a nearly six year development. Where some game makers are itching for the next console generation to start so it can ramp up the declining console market, Pitchford and his team of creators are sitting pretty.

Digital Trends caught up with Pitchford at a recent event to talk about the prolonged development of Aliens, the unique technology powering that game, and the future of how we play video games.

Aliens: Colonial Marines uses a new engine. Why? Why not use something simple like Unreal Engine 3 to speed up development?

We haven’t really talked about it much, but we made a proprietary lighting engine for this game. Even though we’re at the end of this console generation, because this is a deferred rendering engine it’s going to give us a good sense of what next gen games are going. Deferred rendering is the future. We do leverage Unreal for the architecture and the data sets, for a lot of the under the hood stuff, but in terms of graphics, that’s the stuff we created just for this.

The Aliens films, to do that authentically, we needed deferred rendering. We needed dynamic lights and shadows. In the current generation, for games without a non-deferred renderer, all of the lighting is sort of baked into the environment which means it’s static. Things can’t move. Now take the scene in the Sulaco: There are so many things shifting around, with crates sliding across the room, ship rocking and lolling. If things move, the lights all need to work. When stuff’s blowing up, when you’re on the surface of LV-426, the atmosphere is alive. We needed that to feel natural, so we needed the lighting to be rendered in real time with the game. If you think about some of the other stuff we’re doing like Borderlands, it has a totally different look and feel. Our Brothers in Arms franchise, it’s a totally different environment and feel. Aliens has a very unique art direction, so it demanded custom technology.

You said the team met with Ridley Scott to discuss doing the game before it went into production. When did that meeting happen?

I think that was May of 2006. Maybe 2005.

At what point in the past seven years then did you decide to build this unique technology?

The meeting was 2005 or 2006, but the deal didn’t happen for another year or so after that.

That’s when Sega announced it had the Alien franchise license.

We hadn’t even written the first line of code and Sega was so excited that they and Fox had to turn around and put out a press release! (laughs) It was a business statement, but if you’re an Aliens fan like me and you hear, “There’s going to be a sequel to the movies as a video game and Gearbox is making it!?” suddenly there’s this expectation. I want that now! Usually when we make a game, we’ll be all the way through pre-production and into production before an announcement is made.

It was after our prototype, after our pre-production, that John Cavanagh, one of our programmers, took on the task of building the new renderer for this game. I believe we’ll be using this technology for a while. It’s going to be very useful in the future.

So that was the end of 2008 when we started making that technology and it was probably finished by the end of 2010.

Speaking of 2008, that was when you announced that Battlestar Galactica writers David Weddle and Bradley Thompson would be working on Aliens: Colonial Marines. What role did they play?

Those guys are awesome! We had a framework and sketches of characters when we started the game. Those guys came in and wrote all of this material that brought the characters to life for us. So now we don’t have to think about what we want the characters to be, we think, “Okay, in this situation, how would Bella react to this? What would Winter say?” We know the answer because those guys helped us flesh everything out. Amazing, amazing work. They wrote enough material that we could have an entire series of television, honestly. I loved working with them. [Gearbox writer] Mikey Neumann was able to work very closely with them, and he was able to adapt what they did and write it to a video game, which is very different than writing for a passive movie. The quality that we’ve gotten in the narrative was the result of that iterative process and David and Bradley were instrumental in that. It was so cool to work with them.

I’m not sure if you’re office is still like this, but I saw a picture of it once and the game console collection on display in there is impressive to say the least. You clearly love this old, devoted technology. Aliens, Borderlands, all of Gearbox’s games really are clearly built as multiplatform games, both PC and console. My question for you: What’s the future of the console? Do we need them anymore?

How far in the future are we talking about?

Say fifteen years.

Obviously power is great. There are two components to this. One is energy drawn from whatever source you get it from. In fifteen years, wireless power still won’t be ubiquitous. We’ll be experimenting with it in fifteen years and some people will probably have appliances in their garages that allow their cars to charge wirelessly, but we won’t have ubiquitous wireless power for all devices. So in fifteen years, we’ll still see an advantage in things that can plug into a wall, a devoted power source, and draw a tremendous amount of energy.

The more energy we can draw, the more fuel we have for computing power. Computing power takes energy. Computing power will always allow us to simulate things, whether it’s visuals or gameplay or logic or physics. The more computing power we have, the more robust that simulation will be. Within fifteen years, we’ll still be using our senses—touch, sight, sound—to consume that simulation. So the processing power we’ll be using will still be simulating something that reaches us through our normal senses. We won’t be at a point where our senses can be tricked into something that’s like the holodeck or when something’s plugged right into our brain, where there’s no interpretive layer between the simulation and perception, that’s not going to happen yet.

Within that construct, power will still be a factor and power will let us do all kinds of things. We’re going to see some new fronts in the next fifteen years that are kind of difficult to imagine when you just think, “Okay, I’ve got a dedicated machine, I’ve got a portable thing that uses a battery like a phone or handheld, I’ve got large format stuff like in a movie theater.” You’re going to see that whole spectrum, and it will largely be the same. It will be an iteration of how we understand entertainment, but it’ll be a massive iteration. You’ll see between twelve and twenty-four times the complexity possible on today’s machines.

Today, though, what does having your game on a console give you? What’s the benefit of the technology?

One of the advantages that consoles have for a customer is that you can trust it. It’s a simple price, an entry point that’s accessible, and you can plug it in and it all works. It rides this balance where one step up is a PC that draws a lot more power and a big step up in visuals, but a lot more complexity since it’s a moving platform. That makes it not so comfortable. The dedicated platform is fixed, though, which lets us developers make tremendous assumptions about what the customer is using. Because of those assumptions, we can commit ourselves, we can be very efficient in what we make.

Consoles let you make those assumptions. Look at the iPhone. Because there are now several generations of iPhone, in creating software we can either choose to eliminate a percentage of the potential user base by making our game only compatible with the iPhone 4 or 5 or we can hold ourselves back and cover the whole spectrum. Even that fragmentation changes our efficiency and quality from what it would be if we had a single, unchanging platform.

Because the phone cycle is ramping up so quickly, our only choices are abandon our software, iterrating it, or making new software. With a long console cycle, we can really commit ourselves to that single fixed platform and be super optimal. You can feel it in the results. We’re doing things on these platforms that are a lot more incredible than what we saw at the beginning of the generation.

It really doesn’t matter, though. At the end of the day in the entertainment business, what you care about is how many people can I reach and to what extent can I satisfy them. Our mission is to make people happy. We want to entertain people wherever they are.

Beef up your browser with the best Google Chrome extensions.

Google Chrome in its purest form is a beast of a browser, but if you install the right extensions and give it extra functionality, you can transform it into even more of a beast – like a fire-breathing grizzly bear on ‘roids. Ever wanted to control a fire-breathing grizzly bear on ‘roids? You’ll have some idea what it’s like when you polish up your Chrome experience with the best Google Chrome extensions around. More of a Firefox kind of person? Check out our picks for the best Firefox add-ons. 

HoverZoom

Hover over an image and it will magically be expanded to the biggest size possible. It doesn’t work with every image on every website, but it works with most major ones and it’s constantly expanding. 

Plain Clothes

This extension strips away all the bells and whistles of the Web and provides you with a clean, minimalist Web browsing experience.

FastestChrome

Highlighting text from a page, copying it, opening a new tab, pasting it and hitting enter to search had already branded itself deep into our muscle memory by the time we discovered FastestChrome, which executes the whole routine in a single click. It pops up a bubble full of search sites whenever you highlight text, and does a lot of other cool tricks, too. The qLauncher, for instance, lets you launch any of your favorite bookmarks by combining them with a key.

Chrome to Phone

Looking at a webpage, but have to leave your computer to go elsewhere? Send the page to your phone so you can view it on the go. No e-mailing necessary.

IETab

Internet Explorer sucks. But as much as we hate to use it, the features on certain pages force us to. Rather than digging around in your start bar and cluttering up your computer with another instance of another browser whenever you need to hit your bank (or any other IE-centric site), fire it up within Chrome using IETab. It will seamlessly appear alongside your other pages – but it’s running in IE. Until browsers reach that day of perfect compatibility where they all hold hands and sing songs together around HTML 5, this is the next best thing.

Lazarus

Ever taken the time to fill out a form or application online, only to have it disappear when you click submit? Lazarus saves you from these situations by temporarily saving the text you enter into forms and allowing you to auto-refill the fields at the click of a button. 

Lastpass

Lastpass is a password manager that saves you from the hassle of remembering a zillion different passwords. It can auto-fill fields for you, and can also be used to generate highly secure passwords when you create new accounts.

Ghostery

Ghostery blocks thousands of different trackers and bugs, and prevents them from collecting data on the sites you visit and links you click. A must have for those who value their privacy.

Adblock

This one is pretty self-explanatory. It blocks all ads on the Web – banner ads, text ads, ads in YouTube videos, ad sandwiches, ads on kabob, lemon ads, ads and potatoes, and ad gumbo (it doesn’t block bad Forrest Gump references though).

Google Quick Scroll

Use this extension to help you locate relevant information faster. When you search for something in Google and click a link, Google Quick Scroll will highlight the text that’s most relevant to your query and allow you to jump to that section of the page.

Downloads

So simple, yet so useful. The extension merely adds a Downloads shortcut to your Chrome toolbar, eliminating the need to click the wrench and find it buried among other options. Why isn’t this a default option in Chrome?

Facebook Open Graph Redirect

Have you ever clicked on a video that somebody posted on Facebook, but are then forced to install annoying apps like SocialCam or Viddy before you can watch it? This extension lets you skip all that nonsense and jump directly to the desired video.

Feedly

Feedly automatically scours your history for blogs, news sources and topics you’re into, then aggregates them all into a giant “magazine cover” with continuously updating stories and pictures, Twitter feeds, and pictures. You can use it as a shortcut on your toolbar, or simply set it as your “new tab” page and take in personalized content every time you pop open a new tab.

Clickable Links

This one takes any URL or email address that isn’t a clickable and turns it into a blue hyperlink. You won’t notice it when you install it, but it makes surfing the Web just that much easier.

Gmail Offline

Allows you to read and respond to e-mails without an Internet connection. It essentially saves e-mails locally on your computer for a short period of time, and will send off all of your responses as soon as you acquire an Internet connection.

Cloudy Calculator

You probably have a calculator on your desktop, but why leave your browser just to do a quick calculation? Cloudy Calculator can not only handle numbers and complex equations, but can also give you answers to obscure stuff like “mass of Jupiter divided by the average weight of an African elephant.” 

Personal Blocklist

Allows you to block specific websites and prevent them from appearing in your search results.

Quickrr Maps

Find locations quicker with this extension. Click the icon, enter your search, and it’ll display the nearest Google Maps results.

Forecastfox Weather

One of our favorite Firefox extensions is now on Chrome, and it’s just as solid. Forecastfox Weather adds a clean icon on your toolbar, providing weather at a glance with current weather conditions. WIth just one click, it also pops out of the toolbar with an extended overview of the weather. Although not quite as modern-looking as The Weather Channels’s 1-ClickWeather, we find the pop-up much more informative – especially the seven-day forecast, which you can click through without even opening a tab. 

The Camelizer

Similar to PriceBlink, this is a price-checker extension that helps you shop smarter online.

Web of Trust

Never worry about the links you click on again with WoT. It’s a Web safety extension that relies on user ratings of websites. It has a large user base and will display a color-coded circle next to every link on the Web that informs you how others have rated it.

Smooth Gestures

Default keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl-T work fine for reformed Unix users hell-bent on doing everything with a keyboard commands, but for the lackadaisical mouse surfer, gestures are king. Holding the right mouse button and performing any number of intuitive gestures (right to left will send you back, for instance) turns your pointer into the ultimate shortcut tool. You can even make your own gestures if the defaults don’t quite jibe with your memory. 

ViewThru

Shortened links can be deceptive sometimes, but with this extension you’ll be able to see the full URL that they take you to before you click.

BugMeNot

Do you ever wish that you could comment on a blog post or forum without having to register and create an account first? BugMeNot allows you to bypass this sort of compulsory Web registration by using its login info for thousands of different sites. 

Priceblink

If you do any amount of online shopping, this extension is a must-have. It indexes hundreds of different online retailers and alerts you of the lowest price for any item you’re currently looking at. 

AutoPager

Clicking ‘Next Page’ is so 2010. This extension auto-loads the next pages of websites and allows you to scroll continuously while you browse.

RemindMe

Ever sit down to a computer to work and walk away with more new tasks to do than you finished? We know the feeling. RemindMe lets you quickly scribble down reminders – like “pay bills” – and set automatic reminders to do them in the future. The icon also shows pending tasks for when you stumble across some free time and want to clear your plate.

Instant Translate

Lets say you’re browsing recipes for curry and you come across one that’s written in Thai. Instead of having to copy-and-paste it into Google Translate, you can just highlight the text and this extension will instantly provide a translation in the same window.

WhatFont

See a font you like on the Web, but don’t know what it’s called? This extension will figure it out for you.

Google Mail Checker Plus

Gmail has lured us away from the sophisticated machinations of Microsoft Outlook for good, but we can’t help but miss those new e-mail notifications. Unless you have your Gmail feeding to a smartphone, you never really know when a new message arrives until you check. Google Mail Checker Plus solves this dilemma by tying directly into your Gmail account and showing the number of unread messages in the Chrome toolbar. It even wiggles and turns red when you have messages waiting. Clicking on it brings up a quick rundown of new messages, so you can read without even dropping what you’re doing. 

RSS Subscription Extension

This one is a must-have for RSS junkies. Whenever a website offers an RSS subscription, an orange button will appear in your OmniBar that, if clicked, will display a list of available feeds that you can subscribe to with another click.

Google Similar Pages

You found a site you like. And now you’re looking for more of the same. Before hitting up Google for “water polo enthusiast forums,” just click the Similar Pages icon. Besides producing four shockingly reliable similar pages for you to peruse, it generates four thumbnails so you can see where you’re headed before you click. 

WriteSpace

This is a wonderfully minimalist writing app that stores work locally and can be used even when Chrome is offline.

Tab Scissors

Ever needed to look at two pages side-by-side? Tab Scissors lets you snip tabs down and compare them side-by-side

Too Many Tabs

I don’t know about you, but it seems like my tabs multiply when I’m not looking. This extension helps you manage tab overload with an organized, tiled interface.

Copy Plain Text

Nine times out of ten, you want the text, not the formatting. I don’t care what you’re saying, if it’s in Comic Sans I just can’t take it seriously. 

Shareaholic

Banish the copy-and-paste shortcut forever. Shareaholic lets you enter passwords for over 100 services – including Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and Buzz – then share any page on them in a second from the toolbar shortcut. Use wisely, lest your friends crank the valve on your feeds to “off” forever to silence your flood of links. The suffix “aholic” is used for a reason, folks.

The HTC Droid DNA represents a big change in the smartphone world. It is the first 1080p smartphone and has tons of power under the hood, making it one of the hottest smartphones around. Unfortunately, it also is an exclusive to only one network – Verizon – and is locked down thanks to its bootloader. Or is it?

The good news is that the folks behind the popular Android site “Android Police” and the talents at RootzWiki have now found a way to open things up a bit more. The idea is that you have to modify the device so it appears as an unbranded phone, and thus will allow it to work just fine with HTC’s official bootloader unlocking tool.

This is excellent news since it now makes an already attractive smartphone even better. Now that you can in fact unlock the HTC Droid DNA, are you tempted to pick up this 5-inch smartphone from Verizon?

For a guide on getting the Droid DNA unlocked, check out the source link.

Got old machinery collecting dust? Follow our guide to recycle old desktops and laptops the right way, including erasing all of your personal data properly.

We live in a world of incredible innovation in consumer technology. What’s cutting-edge now (Retina display Macbook Pro, anyone?) will likely be ho-hum only a few years down the road. We’ve all grown accustomed to the planned obsolescence of our electronics. Keeping a primary computer running smoothly for five years or longer seems like a herculean task, and very few self-respecting gamers would consider using their machine for longer than two years – at least, not without major component upgrades.

There’s undoubtedly an upshot to all this. Newer, faster, more powerful devices keep popping up, and in turn the technology we were previously perfectly happy with gets cheaper and cheaper. But there’s a darker side, too. Discarded, outdated, or broken electronics pose a serious environmental problem. 

Previously, we’ve covered how to recycle your old iPhones. With the holidays on our heels, you may soon be getting that new laptop you’ve been wanting. But what do you do with your old one? Follow our guide on recycling computers to make sure your well-loved laptops and desktops end up where they belong.

A word of caution on recycling

Before getting into the details, it’s important to understand how – and why – to recycle computer parts ethically. According to a 2010 NPR story, even when we try to do the right thing and recycle our e-waste, about 80 percent of it ends up in countries like China, India, or Nigeria. There, during so-called “dirty” recycling, low-wage workers perform tasks like bathing computer parts in acid to retrieve gold components. They’re exposed to heated mercury, lead, and other toxic materials without any protective gear. Meanwhile, unprofitable plastic parts often end up in landfills anyway.

Dirty recycling has become such a problem that at least 25 states have passed laws regulating e-waste, usually by requiring electronics manufacturers to recycle as much as they sell. Below, we’ll cover how to find reputable and environmentally-responsible recyclers for your goods.

Step 1: Wipe all personal information

While many recyclers and donation programs offer to wipe your hard drive for you, we recommend erasing all personal data yourself for safety reasons. Don’t forget to back up everything you need first!

Some beginners fall into the trap of thinking that simply deleting personal files will do the trick. This makes your data harder to find, but doesn’t erase it entirely. An experienced programmer can still retrieve it easily. Rather, we recommend fully overwriting your hard drive, preferably multiple times, and then re-installing your operating system from scratch if you need to (for instance, if you’re donating the computer). After all, physically smashing your hard drive to bits a la Office Space may be satisfying, but it still doesn’t solve the problem of environmental contaminants.

When it comes to drive-rewriting programs, the U.S. Department of Defense guidelines serve as the market standard. However, any of the following software should do the trick. Again, don’t forget to back up your files and make a backup disk of your OS before beginning!

1. Darick’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) – Darik’s Boot and Nuke, an unsupported freeware program, gets the job done. Download the .iso file, burn it to disk, and boot your computer using DBAN after entering the BIOS screen.

2. Active@ Kill Disk – While Active@ Kill Disk comes free for basic wipes, only the paid version ($39.95) conforms to DOD standards. Don’t be fooled by the mediocre rating; most low-raters didn’t realize that this program would do what it says it does and were surprised to see their hard drive erased.

3. WipeDrive – WipeDrive is the power tool of disk overwrite utilities: not only does it conform to DOD standards, but its clients actually include the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, as well as the U.S. Army and Navy. However, this prowess doesn’t come free. The unpaid version only wipes 25 percent of your data, making it useless except for trials, while the full version is currently on sale for $19.95.

Step 2: Attempt to donate your computer

Remember the old “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” posters from grade school? Well, there’s a reason that “Reduce” and “Reuse” come first. It’s actually much better for the environment to donate your old computer to a place that might still be able to use it – like a school or retirement center – than it is to strip it down and recycle it part-by-part, which is both energy- and labor-intensive. In other words, unless you dropped your computer in a bonfire or spilled hot cocoa across the motherboard, it’s worth trying to donate it before you opt for recycling. The following are all good starting places.

1. The National Cristina Foundation – From the website of the National Cristina Foundation, you can search for non-profits in your neighborhood seeking computers for at-risk students, people with disabilities, and low-income individuals. This way, your donation stays local, and you might even help someone join the digital age.

2. Dell Reconnect through Goodwill – Dell Reconnect represents Dell’s partnership with Goodwill, and in many ways, offers the best of both worlds. If Goodwill workers can refurbish and resell your computer, they will; if not, they’ll recycle it for you, adhering to an e-waste policy that prohibits export to developing countries. Best of all, the program accepts any brand of computer in any condition at more than 2,500 locations and can provide receipts for tax purposes.

3. Free Geek – Free Geek accepts even broken computers and spare parts, making it one of the few donation services to take machines in any condition. Afterward, this teaching-oriented non-profit transforms them into “FreekBoxes,” Frankenstein-like assemblages of refurbished parts running Linux. Even if you don’t live in Portland, Oregon, where the company is based, you can mail used computers and other electronics to them. Simply write “Attn: Hardware Donation” on the package. You’ll need to pay for shipping yourself. Free Geek also asks for a nominal monetary donation with each electronics donation, but your entire donation is tax-deductible, and goes to a fantastic cause to boot.

Step 3: Recycle through a reputable service

As discussed above, all electronics recycling programs are not created equal. Be sure to check out the EPA guide and the list below to find places to donate for free while keeping a good conscience.

1. e-Stewards certified recyclers – All e-Stewards certified recyclers come pre-vetted as environmentally responsible. Affiliated with the Basel Action Network, a major activist group fighting e-waste, e-Stewards certification means no landfills, no incinerators, no prison labor, and no export to developing countries.

2. Best Buy – As of September, Best Buy’s Recycling Program has committed to partnering exclusively with recyclers certified to e-Stewards standards, making it one of the best “big box” options for recycling. The program will accept any computer brand in any condition, no matter where you bought it, as well as TVs, cell phones, and most other electronics. Just bring your worn-out goodies to any Best Buy store.

3. Dell – In addition to the Dell Reconnect program through Goodwill mentioned above, Dell partners with FedEx to provide Dell Mail-Back Recycling. This may be a good option for rural computer users. Dell computers are always free to send in, and you can send in any other brand with the purchase of a new Dell product.

4. Apple – The Apple Recycling Program comes with a cool incentive: if Apple’s contractors decide that your device still has resale value, you’ll get an Apple Store gift card as thanks. Otherwise, your computer will be recycled for free, following standards that ban landfills, incinerators, prison labor, and overseas shipping. Since the program provides a free shipping label, this option also fits the needs of rural consumers. Just start by entering info on an accepted device – iPhone, iPad, Mac computer, or PC computer – to get a gift card quote.

[Image credits: Curtis Palmer, Beth Kantor, Simon Yeo]