Its fun to open takem appart and plug em in with the case off, watch the read write heads move. Well its fun for about 10 seconds and keeps you from wanting to buy one of the new 150 Raptors with a window.
If you fix PCs you can use it to demonstrate to a customer what the click click noise is and why all their data is for all practical purposes gone forever.
You can spend a $1000+ to have someone use clean room equipment to mount the platters on an identical working drive to recover data.
I am thought about mounting one with 3000 grit sand paper and seeing if it can be used to buff out the scratches on CD/DVDs, but the center spindle got in the way.
The platters make good mirrors.
Finally when you get enough bad components to build an entirely broken PC Cracked CPU, Unstable Motherboard, PSU that smokes when you turn it on, case fan's that won't spin, sound cards that lock up the PC when they are installed, dead DVD+RW, dead floppy, dead mouse, dead keyboard, the works.
Drop it off at a local computer repair shop that is incompetent and is well known for ripping off their customers. (though of this after a friend was told that thier laptop had a bad motherboard after being in the shop for two weeks, turned out the only problem was battery wasn't firmly connected which I discoverd and fixed in under three minutes)
Tell them that everything worked fine until you opened an email attachment from someone you didn't know. Tell em that your entire business is run off this PC and if they get get it running withing 24 hours you will slip then an extra $200 bucks.
Document the entire proceedings with a hidden camera and recorded phone conversations.
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