heard of those companies that buy your old, even non operating, computers and cell phones, etc? Anybody ever had any experience with them? I'm wondering if I sell my old laptop that was rendered inoperable by a virus, do they have the legal right to do what they want with whatever pictures they find on the hard drive?

Besides that, have you found a buyer who pays better than others?

thanks in advance

I don't know about those services but if you have files on that hard drive that you really want
you might try Linux System Rescue CD .
I had a drive that was hit with the Yoper virus back in 2000 and in 2008 I used this software
and I recovered countless hours of scanned images and pictures of toys, etc.
Breifly, the software will scour a selected drive and recover what you specify (file extentions)
and copy them to another specified drive.
I don't remember it being very intuitive, but maybe the interface has been improved.
I remember not being sure it was working, but it did work.
I did my 8 gig drive over night.
It found thousands of files (.jpg) and I was able to sort out all the temporary internet files
just by sorting file size.
Very few file names were preserved but i can't complain.
I got about 90+ percent of my files back.

http://www.sysresccd.org/SystemRescueCd_Homepage

you can buy a set of USB to SATA/IDE cables for less than $20, pull your laptop hard drive out, and connect it to another computer to recover anything of importance or to format the drive if there are files you don't want someone else to have access to.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6812189169

I have that one and it has served me well. you could also connect your drive to a healthy pc and run a virus scan if you are feeling motivated.

another option would be to boot linux from a flash drive and save anything of importance that way if taking your laptop apart doesn't sound like fun.

To answer your original question I have 0 experience with electronics recyclers but you have plenty of options if you are trying to access your old files before someone else does. feel free to message me if you need help with any of the above.