What do we do with our old computers.  In our office and storage we have at least 20 or so carcasses.  These are not road kill but computers we have taken off our customers hands after selling them new PC's or laptops.  Some where just old and sitting around so we offered to recycle them and perform a DOD wipe of their data.  

Let me tell you what we have been doing on the recycling side but before I do let me let you know that we take this seriously.  As I make this entry on our blog I am doing it on an old G3 PowerMac tower.  One of our clients had it sitting around gathering dust so I thought great PC for a my daughters.  They have an old iMac and their school uses Macs so I thought GREAT!  When I bought it back to the shop I thought "Let's see what we can do with this".  I upgraded the RAM from 256MB to 1GB, that helped a great deal.  I put in a DVD burner to replace the stock CD-ROM.  I then ordered a new processor taking it from a clunky 350MHz to a full 1GHz.  Needless to say I decided to make this my main PC.  

Yes, I do like Macs.  Growing up our schools used Macs.  During my college years I worked for the Palm Beach County library systems and worked on Macs.  Small confession, I purchased my first IBM PC compatible system my senior year in college.  I wrote most of my papers in college on an Amiga and a MacBook.  Needless to say I have an affinity for Macs.

 Well, with a little time, spare memory, spare DVD, a $109 CPU and a spare 19" widescreen LCD I have a very capable computer to use.  This same principle has been applied over the last year.  We have taken spare parts and put together computers for families that do not have the economic means to purchase a new computer for their children.  When we can we use the original Windows XP Home licenses that come with the PC's unless we are working with a little bit older PC.  With the PC's that are not that current we have installed an Open Source operating system called Ubunto.  By taking this approach we have been able to improve the lives of some families in our community, offer very inexpensive parts for some of our clients and prevent landfills from receiving more hard to decompose material.

 This is part of our green outlook.  Another part is building low power consumption computers.  But that is another blog entry. . .