Donate Your Old Hardware to Those Who Can Use It [Blog Action Day 2008]

[Leo Mauler]

--- On Wed, 10/15/08, JDP/Frogman <jdpruente at gmail.com> wrote:

> Donate Your Old Hardware to Those 
> Who Can Use It [Blog Action Day 2008]
> via Lifehacker by Kevin Purdy on 
> 10/15/08
>
> There are lots of cool things you can 
> do with leftover hardware, from building 
> a home-baked server box to reviving an 
> old laptop and beyond. But one of the 
> best hacks you can pull off is making 
> your gear available for the people and 
> communities that can't afford the latest 
> and greatest. 

What?  Perpetuate the idea that "Linux is what you put on old computers"???  Perish the thought!

;-)

> Some of the systems that end up at 
> Computers for Children (CFC) come 
> from bulk upgrades at corporate or 
> governmental entities, but personal 
> donations can be crucial in filling 
> in the gaps. An IT department might, 
> for example, yank the hard drives 
> from an entire fleet of beige desktop 
> boxes for security or salvage purposes, 
> leaving them mostly useless for 
> renovation purposes.

> From my brief interviews and tour at 
> CFC, I learned a few things about what 
> similar charities are looking for:
> Working hard drives: They're often the 
> first thing to go on otherwise functional 
> systems, and while you may think your 40 
> GB Maxtor is too tiny for your MP3 vaults, 
> it's perfect for a shared community center 
> or school system.

It should also be pointed out that any size hard drive can be put to good use when Linux is the OS.  1GB to 4GB hard drives are still "young" enough to work well, and they help use donated hard drives which are too big for motherboard BIOS limitations.  Say you have six older computers, each with a motherboard with a 137GB hard drive limit, and a company donates six 160GB hard drives.  Normally those hard drives would be useless in your six older machines, or would have to be jumpered to less than 137GB, wasting some of the space.

However, a boot hard drive which is less than 137GB in size, such as an old 1GB-4GB hard drive, allows Linux to boot, and once Linux is booted it ignores the motherboard BIOS and uses any size hard drive, allowing full use of all 160GB of hard drive space in those drives.

Since older computers generally have two IDE channels, this means that three 4GB hard drives (plus one CD/DVD drive) could be put to use in an older computer to give it a total size of 12GB.  As Linux allows for putting different system directories on different hard drives (and much easier than with other OSes), a three 4GB hard drive computer could be easily set up with /boot and / on one drive, /usr on the second drive, and /home on the third, with <swap> on either the /boot or / drive, or the /home drive.  While larger hard drive sizes are preferable, 4GB hard drives are still very useful to a "have-not" computer lab.

==========

I'm a little surprised that there was no mention of Kansas City's own homegrown effort to put used computers and computer knowledge into the hands of those who may not otherwise be able to acquire either:

The Surplus Exchange
http://www.SurplusExchange.org/
518 Santa Fe, Kansas City MO 64105
Open 9-5 Tuesday through Saturday
Phone: 816-472-0444
Fax: 816-472-8105

The Surplus Exchange takes in donations, refurbishes them, and then sends them back out at cheap prices to the general public and deep discounts to non-profit organizations.

They also do a "Learn & Earn" program where students from poverty-stricken families, who would not otherwise have a home computer, can take a class where they learn how to build and maintain a PC, and then take home the PC they build in class (along with the monitor, keyboard, mouse, and a printer).  As the class is for students who have no money to buy a computer on their own, the classes are funded by outside sponsors so that the students pay no fees to take the classes and do not have to buy the computer they build.

http://www.surplusexchange.org/learnearn.html