Monday, May 07, 2007

Want a cheap PC?

So, you say you want a cheap PC. Maybe not for you, but maybe one of your friends needs a PC to access the Internet, and send email. If that is all you need the PC for, read on.

Free Geek, located in Portland, Oregon, takes old PCs and rebuilds them. If you are dropping off a PC, or PC components, then they ask for a donation to cover their costs. They take the old PCs, repair the ones that are still useable, and install free software on them.

The software that Free Geek installs is a version of the Linux Ubuntu operating system, with the Gnome desktop environment. If you have used Windows before, the basics of Gnome should not be hard to figure out. You can see screenshots of it here: http://www.gnome.org/start/2.0/screenshots/

To get a cheap PC, you can volunteer to work at Free Geek. If you do volunteer work for 24 hours, they will give you a free PC. They will also train you how to use your new software.

So, where is Free Geek? It is in the following cities.

Portland, Oregon

Chicago, Illinois

Columbus, Ohio

Fayetteville, Arkansas

Michigan / Indiana

Tennessee

Vancouver, BC, Canada

Internationally, there are other sites that recycle old PCs. You can find a list of them on Free Geek’s site at:

http://freegeek.org/recyclelink.php

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Great way to get a free PC and learn something!