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

[William Park]

Weird, I didn't get Paul's original post.  Anyways, I can volunteer on
weekend.

If you can't sell them as "laptop", then try selling the mainboard as
"embedded x86 board" with
    - power supply, LCD screen, wireless, ethernet, USB, VGA, audio,
      SODIMM slot, memory card reader, harddisk, CD drive, and battery.
All builtin, included, or connector provided.  Try that with Raspberry
or BeagleBone.
-- 
William


On Thu, Oct 02, 2014 at 07:45:27AM -0400, jmiles242 at gmail.com wrote:
>   Original Message  
> From: Paul Nijjar
> Sent: Thursday, October 2, 2014 2:31 AM
> To: kwlug-disc at kwlug.org
> Reply To: KWLUG discussion
> Subject: [kwlug-disc] Volunteer help wanted: save some laptops!
> 
> 
> 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