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Ask Slashdot: How To Donate Older Computers to Charity?
yanom writes "My school gave me several circa-2006 computers with no operating system. I fixed them up, and now they run Lubuntu fairly well, making them great internet/LibreOffice/general Linux workstations. I've been wanting to donate them to local nonprofits where they'll go to good use — for example, I've already given several to a local church for them to use in their afterschool care/tutoring program. However, I'm having trouble finding other places where these machines could go to good use. How should I best conduct this search? How can I find nonprofits that could benefit from these workstations?"
Are they P4 or Core processors? If they are P4, just recycle them.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
new PC can be bought for a few hundred $$$. comes with MS Windows and you can run office on it. very easy to set up out of the box
used PC you have to pay someone $50 or more per hour to configure them one by one and pay the software licenses
and even 2006 computers without 4GB of RAM are SLOW. try running Chrome with a few tabs open. there are $279 best buy specials with 4GB of RAM
destroy the hard drives if you're paranoid and just junk the PC's
just take them to goodwill and let them figure it out.
With the current state of things, computers and electronics are ubiquitous, cheap, and rapidly evolving. At this point, I consider machines from the era to be essentially trash, even when they can function well enough using your favorite distro. They take up too much space and use too much power, and they struggle to handle the world's new common platform: HTML+CSS+js. They will also accelerate down the slide to obsolescence much faster than newer equipment over an equal period of time.
I feel like dumping those things on charities is just giving them a burden. They may have to spend money to put the machines to use, and they will have to take care of throwing them away soon enough. I say use your energy to find a good recycler so that the metals in those old junkers might be reclaimed for tomorrow's tech.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
I applaud your altruism; but I've done the same kind of thing in the past, and regretted it.
Not to be too paranoid, but please make sure you've got all your paperwork in order, (you have to right to pass on the PCs etc.), and explicitly state 'no warranty' etc. What if one of the PCs catches fire, and burns down the old folks home you donated it to? Yeah, I know I sound nuts, be we live in a crazy world.
Oh yes, and regarding support. They'll drive you nuts. Really.
Junk the things and just give some cash to a worthy cause.
Fuck that. In about a year WinXP will no longer get security updates, so you'd be handing the recipients a ticking bomb unless they're kept off the Internet.
Install a distro with an easy UI like Mint-MATE and they'll do just fine, really.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Charities are not a waste disposal service. Have them disposed of properly and safely, and the useful materials extracted and recycled. Even if you find a charity who'll take them, you're just dumpling that problem on them a year or two from now - and, as several other commenters have said, they probably use enough power the charities would be better of buying something newer.
Some came it with a usable operating system; some had to have one installed. I'd always stick Ubuntu on.
None of them ever failed to sell. After all, the price was right, and the people usually needed whatever they could get. I felt good about it, because a computer that would have seen the scrap heap got reused. Let's face it: for word processing and simple spreadsheets, it doesn't take that much computer. You can also browse the web, if you stay away from overbloated sites. Email is a no brainer.
And, if they didn't like Linux, they were free to install Windows or whatever they chose. Given the financial state of a lot of these people, I doubt they could have afforded Microsoft's price. But Linux at least let them see the machine was funcitonal.
You are right that the general public isn't comfortable using Linux. Unfortunately, you falsely imply that they are comfortable using Windows. The vast majority of people who would be in a position to go to a library or Non-Profit don't know the difference. Point them to the little icon that launches firefox and/or chromium and not only is it true that they couldn't care less if it is Linux or Windows, it is also true that they have no idea that it isn't Windows.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
You are right that the general public isn't comfortable using Linux.
Just tell them it's "Android for PCs".
Even charities have minimum needs/standars for computers.
Nonsense. Those Goodwill boxes will take anything. I regularly put my old broken appliances, worn out VHS tapes, empty soda cans, used toilet paper, etc. in them late at night and I've never once heard them complain about it.
Your political party doesn't care about your rights and only represents corporate interests.
They'll just want Windows or Apple.
What's that, is that on Google or Facebook?
Firefox OS and Chromebooks kind of prove the point. The browser IS the computer, to most people. It used to be nobody cared about the process scheduler, anything below the level of the desktop didn't concern 99% of users. These days the browser is the desktop and few care what's beneath. (But some of those who care do care a lot.)
Post them for free on Criagslist. It's possible someone might want them, but I wouldn't count on it. If no one claims them in a week, take them in for recycling. Right now, there's a glut of crappy old single core CPUs out there that no one wants. I've got a few in my basement that I haven't recycled yet.
Join a local Freecycle group (www.freecycle.org) and post an offer. Someone in your community might have a use for them.
No sig? Sigh...
That problem already exists in Windows. Word does not render consistently across multiple versions of Word. Open Office display them just as accurately (The content is all there, but it isn't rendered identically as the composing system)
I don't think you quite understand how this works. People don't bring in their own printers. They use the one that is already set up and configured.
If you put a decent distribution like Mandriva or Magiea on the system there is a wonderful little GUI tool for a system administrator to use in the unlikely event they need to replace the one they are using, and the drivers all get installed automagically in most cases as well.
Finally, just as they have to call a competent person when all else fails in a Windows environment, they simply need to do the same with Linux. Your assumption that they don't have the same issues with Windows is mistaken. I have a system in the building right now (Windows 7) that tries and fails to install HP Pinter software every time you boot it. Your belief that Windows "just works" and Linux "is hard" is based on your ignorance, not experience and a solid grasp on reality.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
1) Find a charity you despise
2) Throw computer through window
They have that now, you know.
Yes, I did know. But if If they knew the difference between Ubuntu and Android, you wouldn't need to dumb it down.
We got an old Dell laptop for my daughter, it came with a locked-down corporate install of Vista. After a few hours wrestling with trying to configure it I said fuck it and just put Ubuntu on it and it "just worked" immediately. Predictably, she complained about the funny looking apps but has learnt to use it. Even Libre Office for schoolwork. And now she has an Android phone, she has rooted it so she can install some of the same utilities she has on the laptop... So there is crossover.
There is a non-profit company in many North American cities that takes old computers, puts them through a testing cycle, recycles all the parts that can't be used, and then builds workstations running linux for either donation to non-profits or cheap resale. They are great and always looking for help. http://www.freegeek.org/ According to the Wikipedia site, they have locations in: Portland, OR; Fayetteville, AR; Central FL; Chicago, IL; Columbus, OH; South Bend, IN (Michiana); Vancouver, BC (Canada); Seattle, WA; Minneapolis-Saint Paul, MN (Twin Cities); Toronto, ON (Canada); Providence, RI; Ferndale, MI (Greater Detroit area); Ephrata, PA (South East Pennsylvania); Athens, GA (Free I.T. Athens)