Most around here sell them to places like retrobox

enine; good but as i stated in metropolitan city,s that has not been the practice sad to say. but there is a tiny light of hope shining in near future.
In L.A. change is slow but beginnig.

Do you want to know how you can help then? Start an organization that will salvage those computers. I am serious. If you can get this together, you could help numerous projects. You would help keep trash low, and then be able to help the computer donation project.

If you could contact the correct people in L.A., I would really appreciate it! Give me a number, and I may give them a call, too.

Please see what you can do. Such an act would give you an amazingly good name and reputation, too.

You can salvage the computers and repair them, or you can send them to me or the Freak Geek organization. You can contact me via my e-mail.

Thanks!

I'm in a city too. That would be a good business to start then, you could haul them away for free rather than them paying someone. Get some programs to wipe the hdd good and sell it as part of your service telling them you will wipe the hdd a few times to make sure no one gets their data. The used server/networking gear is a big market. One company I bought my cisco gear from sells a lot to third world countries that can't afford the new stuff.

Great! If you can get such an organization started, we can talk about working on a partnership. If you could provide us with the computers, that would be extremely helpful. We can work out shipping charges, too.

theoneandonlyonesm & enine; know of several places, glitch in way- corp
greed. since they buy large volume pay minimum and squeeze that last nickel, and have so muxh security risk invested in pc,s hd . they become paranoid. ie; know employee whom acquired my first pc (286 ast) converted to 486pmmx said company had yard stacked with pc,electronic gear,etc. those that did not get rescued by employees u guess rite dump.hum umm. however since most everybody has becomed alerted to that most are now donating them or recycling going to asia. suggestion
ask company,s or org.s what they do with their pc,s. may hit pay dirt!

Find the local VARS, I used to work for one. When companies decide to buy a 100 at a time they would ask us what to do with the old ones. We bought a bunch cheap one time and sold/donated them. File all your business paperwork then find all those sellers and partner with them to help them sell/recycle old pc's. The company I was at didn't want to deal with used stuff except in those few cases where it would help make a sale, we passed up a lot of used machines and referred people to places like retrobox. All the government agencies send everything to a big central warehouse then the stuff the other agencies don't want gets auctioned by the pallet load.

giving pc,s to needy poster,s; am aware of that but as stated that where the snag is. especially civil service to much red tape to over come even for them selves. ah those of us with these ideas ( philanthropic) what we could do if it were not so. oh well must keep hopes up!

I have had the chance to kick in the Linux cause; I was working with a friend who was managing a small club/community. They had had a couple of 350 MHz PCs donated, and I set them up with Linux. It was fairly easy to explain: This is free - and the only system that allows you people to run up-to-date programs without problems. This was accepted...
With regards to having a couple of Linux boxes around for experiments, I remember not very long ago - there was a PC/electronics column in the largest Danish newspaper, Politiken. Their in-house geek ran a series of articles testing how things were done the Linux way. Suddenly, their entire office went Sasser, and I remember a very short notice one week, in which the guy wrote "I was actually expecting to have an article on games for Linux today, but since I have one of the only functional PCs in the office, it has been occupied most of the time by others". Well, how's that for encouragement.
As for using Linux, it is also a question what kind of uses you expect. If the idea is word processing (I would recommend Abiword with your specs), surfing/browsing and e-mail, you can't really feel the difference between a Linux and Windows system, except the Linux system is probably faster.
But the idea is great - and I wish you the best of luck.

Sorry if I am reposting an idea, but i havent had time to read all the posts.

If these computers are going to people who are underprivledged and do not currently have a computer, then the likely hood of an OS being familiar is pretty low. Also, having worked enough with computers at work to have an Os of choice is also unlikely, as the jobs these people occupy arent likely to be computer intensive, or even involving a computer (not a blanket statement, but a trend I have seen while managing Employment programs for the impoverished). Also, internet access is unlikely as well. Maybe Dial-up at some point. If you were to use a system with a package manager where installation could be simplified, possibly a variation on apt-get or an apt-get script a user can click on and execute relieving them from dependency hell, hosted on a website geared toward the users would be great. Then all you would need to do to let them expand thier system would be to provide the scripts as hot new software came out.

This could also be a wonderful way of working in the trend of mainstreaming linux for the desktop.

Also, consider this. how effective are those computers going to be when they are riddled with viri and spyware? Do you plan on including virus software and a firewall?

just my thoughts. Great project....

ezra143; from contacts recieved , they are interested on any pc that is p2
or better. since these orgs are running on shoe string only interested with
pc,s that are viable as teaching tool. for the moment. but others are schools under-financed srtapped for purchasing new pcs. last but not least
individuals whom may not be able to by top of line but gladly accept refurbished ones. concept evolved from learning that large companies ,corporations and civil service departments are/were disposing
pc,s that are replaced with new. what a waste! that is where to start a new industry. more later with further information.

That always annoyed me, try to give someone a P166 and they say, "No I'd rather have a P2 or better" when they don't even have a pc at all so a p166 would be better than what they have
I guess I've been burned too many times. I watched the owner of my company take fast pc's off the desks of employees to give to charities so he could get awards, watched people from those charaities pull up in Jags and $50k lexus's to load those pc's in their trucks and git mad at us for getting dirt from the pc's inside the truck so the owner of the company had to pay to have their cars deatiled, Us tech guys had to buy our own systems to use at work, then gave away pc's myself only to be called at when people couldn't run the game they bought at walmart because the pc was too slow or the sound card wasn't good enough or have my wife be yelled at on the phone and be told she needs to send her husband over to fix this pc that they messed up downloading all kinds of spyware.
Maybe I just don't like people If anyone is in the columbus, OH, USA area, I still have some parts left I will donate to you as long as you don't call me asking me to support them or tell me they aren't good enough so I need to replace them with something better, I'll be happy to bring you a load of stuff that you could use/fix/donate.

enine; there u have it in a nutshell. greed yes yes oh the shame! ah u said
left old pc as is. sure have an old 486 isa running w98 but it si slow compared ti this working on now. it was given to me as a starter up (original base 286 case pc . large enough for being tower uprighted ok ok know more expence than worth. so planning on gutting it build from groung up. except case new mainbd,pwr splly, peripherals even if they are antique but as long as it works it works snail slow its ok ti works!

Insightful posting, sorry I can't comment it all right now. I will definitely be using all of it though. One thing is clear, this is going to be quite a job... not with administering the computers, but "teaching" the users to be careful with software.

Anyway, for some newfound legal issues, the Windows 98 licenses cannot be transerred to us or the users getting the pc's. No details available, but should I ask ?

Therefore, GNU/Linux has just been given the thumbs up! Debian stable or Slackware 8.1/9.1 it is. Vector Linux looks good, and I'll give it a try, but we are pretty firm on distro choice right now.

My only concern with slackware is its package management system. By default, I will exclude a lot of programs, since I don't want the user to be overwhelmed with options. I will also be creating some other slackware packages, for things like Thunderbird and Firefox, things that are not packed by Slackware's team by default. I know of linuxpackages.net, but we want to do this ourselves so that we know exactly what is happening behind the scenes, what options were used in compiling, and how to fix things if things do go wrong.

I don't think that installing all these programs ought to be difficult. I want to offer a graphical tool that presents a list of programs. This is so that a user won't become frightened at any commandline or have to search the internet for programs. We want to offer those services. Of course, the user can always go off on his own if he wants. We won't make it, "our organization-centric" at all. We are not going to modify the systems, only offer custom packages if necessary.

How you may help right now:

Is there a graphical slackware update utility (preferably a frontent for swaret, gtk or X based) available, or could someone write one? It doesn't have to do more than pkgtools, except in true gui form. It needs to display the package name, and description, and be able to connect to a slackware mirror and some other repositories. I don't want to sound restrictive, but if you do write one, GPL'ing it would make things very easy.

Thanks in advance!

theoneandonlySM; partner u r on top of the heap. as u said (leaning on that saddle) giddy up lets go hoss, how ever how to carry all that without
a cart. even then putting it before the horse? got to take it step by step n
build a good foundation. ie: just as LQO is built small beginning then regional and now world wide. it is still that way. every time on forums everybody world wide joins in with ? n answers. but ur concept is attainable. yes sir! thank you for input, appreciated.