How many obsolete Pcs do you have gathering dust in Your office?

Recycling has become an important objective for us all nowadays. I don't know of a local council that does not at least provide recycling bins for glass and metal and most go as far as recycling paper as well.

But before we go to the trouble of ripping an item to bits and making it into something elseââ,¬"car tyres being shredded and made into non-slip mats, for exampleââ,¬"there is an intermediate stage.

The intermediate stage is quite simply: reuse. One very simple example of this is in place at the Lab, we print out important documents on new paper. Once the document has outlived its usefulness we reuse the paper in our printer for the unimportant day-to-day printouts, by simply printing on the other side. Once both sides are printed on the paper is finally tossed into our recycle bin.

Which brings me to the point of PCs and other IT products. At home I have a simple system (I use the hand-me-down methodââ,¬"when an item is no longer fast enough I simply pass it on to a family member as an upgrade to their current system). We use the same system in the Test Labââ,¬"a particular system may start off as a high-end test rig (for a couple of months at least, until it has been well and truly leapfrogged). It then may find itself on one of our desks, belting out reports, or passing through various stages until it drops to the humble role of client in our test LAN. You do not need a great deal of client processing power to choke servers, but eventually they become too underpowered to even run our basic test software.

Our final step is to place the systems outside our door in the hallway with a sign -Free to a good home". Students looking for spare parts inevitably spirit them away before the day is over.

Of course many large companies generally have some form of lease agreement with their outsourcer, so the systems probably never reach the point of total obsolescence before the outsourcer whisks them away to locales unknown. But if you purchase rather than lease your equipment and do not have your own local -magpies", there are plenty of local charities you could donate the equipment to. It can be a bit confusing tracking down which group would benefit the most from your charity. Often schools were a target but nowadays their needs are about the same as any business user and your old PC may well be useless to them as well.

There are a number of easy solutions to the problemââ,¬"organisations dedicated to the distribution of preloved-PCs, for example. One example is Green PC. Green PC works closely with other organisations to refurbish old PCs and most importantly they distribute the PCs to the needy and disadvantaged.

The outdated PCs that you supply to Green PC are Internet-enabled through the installation of a modem card, so that a disadvantaged child or adult has access to many of the educational tools that we simply take for granted.

A complete Pentium 200MHz system might sell for as low as $375, and a refurbished HP Laserjet 5M has been known to go for a very reasonable $240. (They can even supply components to get an old PC up and running again.) Obviously, there are charges associated with the products as the organisation still needs to pay its own overheads.

(Any scrooges please note: you cannot just march in off the streets and snap up a computer bargain, unless you are also armed with a Health Care card or some other documentation to prove your low- income status.)

If you have some old systems and would like to truly help those less fortunate, the Green PC Web site can be found at www.greenpc.com.au or in Melbourne phone 03 9486 9355. The number for Brisbane is 07 3407 2054. Steve Turvey is Lab Manager of the RMIT IT Test Labs.

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