old but new stuff

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 5:40 PM, Ian Stephen <ianstepn at shaw.ca> wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Mar 2012 17:23:50 -0700
> Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Au contraire.  I volunteer in a local charity that takes in donated
>> 'puter stuff and harvests some for metals, and refurbs some for
>> local families with children who might otherwise be 'puterless.  We
>> install XP, 500MB Ram, at least 30GB drive, modem, NIC, video,
>> monitor, keyboard and mouse.  I don't think we put out CRTs any more,
>> but we did within the last 12 months.
>
> How are XP licences dealt with?
> Does that not add a cost that could be avoided by installing Linux?
> Do you put an antivirus?
>

M$ sells XP refurb licenses for $5 each on machines that previously
had a Windows license.  You have to be approved, which apparently was
no big deal for XP.  I understand that at the end of life for XP we
may stop refurbing
because of the extra bureaucratic complications of the next level.
Win 7 I think.
The harvesting operation earns about $40k/year, only because of lots
of volunteer labor. The rest is donations of money.
Linux is a non-starter for this target audience.  We don't give any
training really, so they have to pick stuff up from
friends or school.  Not workable with Linux.
There's some antivirus or other, I don't recall what.  Also a bunch of
free software -- firefox, educational, games, office suite, etc.

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD