[kwlug-disc] Volunteer help wanted: save some laptops!

[Paul Nijjar]

As some of you saw during The Event That Must Not Be Named, Computer
Recycling houses a lot of laptops. We would like to sell these
laptops, except: 

- They take a lot of work to get ready
- We cannot charge much for them (because most of them have dead
  batteries)
- We cannot offer warranties on them because getting replacement parts
  is difficult and expensive.

Thus they have been sitting and rotting, which is a CRIME. 

We would like to make some of these laptops available to the public
instead of e-wasting them. But to do this we need some additional
help, so I thought about asking the KWLUG community to pitch in. Would
you (or somebody you know?) be willing to lend a hand in getting
laptops ready for sale? 

I do not know whether we are thinking of trying a giant work party or
a more sustainable set of regular shifts. 

The tasks involved are: 
- Going through the laptops
- Identifying ones that are good candidates for sale
- Making sure laptop hard drives are wiped
- Doing some limited testing of components
- Listing system specs and laptop deficiencies
- Matching laptops to power supplies
- (possibly?) installing Xubuntu on the laptops to be sold (there is
  another idea floating around that we sell bare hardware to drive
  home the point that we are selling these laptops as-is, with no
  warranty and no repairs). 

Is anybody interested?

If nobody is interested then it is likely that almost all of our
laptops will just go into the e-waste pile, which is a crying shame. 

- Paul 

-- 
All-candidates meetings:
http://www.waterlooregion.org/municipal-elections-2014