Last week I got an email from Bill Dillard, a new employee that just joined the Help Desk Team at Mid Continent on Wednesday. They were about to haul these machines off to the dump, and he stopped them and suggested they provide them to us.
We have about 100 Dell GX150 that we are interested in donating. These systems are fully functional, with the exception of an operating system. The majority of these systems are 886MHz to 1.0Ghz with 512MB of RAM and 20GB - 30GB HDDs. Where would be the best place to deliver them?
There was no way that I had room in either the garage or shed for another 100 computers, but I recognized this as a gift from God, and there is no way I was going to pass up on that many Pentium 3 machines, so I called Bud and asked him to come over and meet the truct from Mid Continent, and to take it over to Briarglen Ministorage (near 31st and 129th) and rent a storage unit to hold them. 50 are already there (less some that Bud and Mike removed to begin working on them), and as I understand it the guy from Mid Continent has a key, so he can drop off another 40 to 50 early next week, and we may even be getting another 100 sometime in the next few weeks. We will also be getting about the same number of APC 280/300 UPSs, and in the near future they will be rolling out a huge number of 19"/20" CRTs iwhen they get their LCD monitors, and we should get those too. We will have to scrounge up mice, keyboards, and power cords, and we are trying to come up with as many 4 to 6 gig hard drives as we can, so we can save some of the larger HDs for use in future Road Warriors, but this is a fantastic opportunity for us.
For some reason our normal method of removing the HD and running Ghost on a Road Warrior does not work on these machines, and we could not get a video driver to work with Win98, but Mike Stockton stayed up all night coming up with a custom Win2K image for these machines, and he came up with a method of imaging them by turning one of the Dells into a temporary Road Warrior.
A screen capture of the wall paper from this new image is:
It has all of the Children programs from the Child image, the best of the Christian programs from the Super Bible / Super Child images, plus a set of MP3 files that will read the New Testament to you. It has a bunch of graphic programs, Adobe readers for PDF, Flash, and Shockwave, Firefox as well as IE, and a firewall, virus protection, and adware protection, so I guess you could say it is very close to our SuperChildNet image, with just a few of the infrequently used things left off, but with the New Testament MP3 included. It is a fantastic image, and I very much appreciate Mike staying up ALL NIGHT developing it, and I know God appreciates it too.
Tracy is contacting the doctor collecting the medical supplies to see when his shipment is going over, and if it is a container load, how much space is available in it for her to include these computers, and when we know that, she, and perhaps some others from her church will be coming down to refurbish the machines they need. It is really easy to refurb these machines; no tools needed. Two buttons pressed opens the case, unplug the HD, take it to a machine with a good HD and unplug the CD on it, plug in the other HD, and do a ghost from a floppy. We can even come up with a way to show them how they can do that themselves, so that if a HD gets corrupted they can convert another machne to a RW and copy one that works.
We still need to try to clear out the machines from the garage that dont have any chance of working, and let Oklahoma Computer Recyclers pick them up, and we need to refurbish the machines we have there that do work, and once that is done try to organize the garage so that we can safely stack things better and maybe not need the ministorage forever (it costs $32 a month), but I am sure that God will show us a way of doing that.