I think you made a typo in the caption, it reads:

"Charity says don't junk kit, send it to Africa instead"

I believe you meant to type:

"Charity says don't junk kit, send it to Alex instead"

Thanks

Having had some 50 HP PC's to dispose of (as a private individual) ranging from Pentium 166MHz to P2 500MHz - all in full working condition and configured ready to run with Linux (with the dual benefit of not only making best use of modest hardware but also obviating any proprietary software licensing issues) - I have found it almost impossible to donate.

Even on Freecycle (a collection of Yahoo recycling groups) I had a success rate of less than 20%. Monitors seem particularly difficult to dispose of in the UK. Nobody seems to want them now that LCD's are the in thing. Whilst I welcome the initiative, more needs to be done to make donating easy at the point of disposal.

I've found that there are great differences in interpretation of the WEE rules. Some people say that WEE allows & encourages giving old kit to local schools & charities. Others say it forbids it.

We used to donate all our old IT kit to local schools & charities. Now, we have to pay for them to be disposed of. It breaks my heart to see all those PIII machines, fulling working, going to the great computer network in the sky. '-)

I wonder if Computer Aid International will dispose of the kit in an environmentally sound way when the Africans have finished with it.

I'm posting this from a teacher training college in Mozambique.

We've got a bunch of old kit here-- Pentium classics and old monitors mostly-- that we're currently trying to get rid of. I wonder if Computer Aid International would like to accept it as a donation?

Rob Morley makes my first point: it seems like a lot of broken, useless kit is going to posion African soil instead of European soil in the interests of "helping the poor of the world." Global NIMBYism at its best.

But surely while the Africans are using this "manna from heaven" they're going to increase their electical consumption. I don't know about you, but I don't see a lot of carbon-friendly power plants on the continent (or any continent for that matter).

Seems that Africans might be better-served by building and buying their own kit. Western meddling in the form of philanthropy seems to have done little more than suppress economic development on a continent full of bright and eager people.

Dear World

Please keep your rubbishy old PCs.

Lots of Love

Africa

Here's the fault in the system - people in Africa want to do the same things with their PCs as the rest of the world. That means that if it is no good in Europe, it is likely no good for Africa.

One assumes that the idea of donating PCs to Africa instead of dumping them is well-intentioned. But since no research into African needs or conditions appears to have taken place, one must conclude that it is ill-informed.

The most popular alternative to Windows is Linux. Even that is starting to need some hefty hardware now that it is growing up. Ubuntu, for instance, now recommend at least 256MB RAM and 4GB HD space for desktop use. That is more memory but less disk space than Microsoft originally recommended for Windows XP.

So whichever route one takes, the chances are that unless you are disposing of a year-old computer, it is not going to be of much use to anyone else. After all, if it was still worth anything you would be able to sell it. But you can’t.

Even keeping a free system up to date may be impossible for the majority of Africans – by way of example, for an installation of Windows XP SP2 and Office 2003 the downloads currently needed to bring the PC up to date total some 200MB. By observation that can take 17 hours over a dial-up line. The telephony costs of that alone are higher than the average monthly wage in many African lands.

Very recently a school in Nigeria received 300 donated computers for their pupils. Just one small technical detail that nobody checked: the school has no electricity.

I work with picking up equipment from council recycling sites and taking them to companies for them to be stripped down. Apart from working IT kit, we remove over 300 TVs from 3 sites per week and I was told that although most of them are in perfect working order, no equipment can be given out to the public or other organisations as once they are dumped, they are council property. Think of the people who could benefit from a free 40 inch TV or P3 PC instead of them going to companies who make money from the parts.

I thought recycling was supposed to benefit everyone?

> Think of the people who could benefit from a free 40 inch TV or P3 PC instead of them going to companies who make money from the parts.

Websites like Freecycle have existed for ages to handle exactly this situation. Small-scale, local, and it works. OK, not as appropriate for businesses, but for disposal of personal possessions, it can lengthen the useful life of most unwanted items in good nick.

"Even [Linux] is starting to need some hefty hardware now that it is growing up. Ubuntu, for instance, now recommend at least 256MB RAM and 4GB HD space for desktop use. That is more memory but less disk space than Microsoft originally recommended for Windows XP."

True enough, but the difference is that:

- XP hobbles in 256MB and really needs at least 512MB and preferably 1GB of RAM

- a fully loaded Linux runs well in 256 MB of RAM

HD space is pretty irrelevant these days. You'd have to go back over 10 years to find a computer with as little as 6.4 GB of disk space and now its almost impossible to buy new disks smaller than 40 GB.

As a concrete example, I run Fedora Core 6 on a 256 MB, 866 MHz PIII system with a 40 GB drive. The entire installed system occupies 4 GB (Linux, full C/C++/Java/Fortran development system, Samba firel sharing, a DNS service, Gnome desktop, Apache web server, Postfix MTA, Leafnode for newsgroups, PostgreSQL, OpenOffice and Opera web browser) plus 5 GB of my own documents, images, assorted files and locally written software. That all runs acceptably fast. Swapping is minimal despite background tasks managed by BOINC (SETI@home and MalariaControl). Its been up 22 days, 20 hours. The last reboot was to install a new kernel release.

Try doing that with XP or Vista at all, let alone doing it in 256 MB RAM.

Martin Gregorie illustrated the case for Linux very neatly.

But the actual intention of mentioning the hardware minima was that the stuff already being sent to Africa frequently does not meet even the documented minimum hardware requirements for the operating system concerned. The PCs that will be dragged from the attic as a result of sudden WEE-directive-inspired generosity promise to be even older and thus worse.

A major international computer recycling organisation that supplies PCs to Africa currently offers Windows XP as a £5.00 optional extra. 90% of their PCs are shipped with a mere 128MB RAM, which is half of even the Microsoft recommendation!

The same charity only raised their minimum hard drive specification to 10GB in mid-March of this year, which gives one a notion of the obsolescence of much of the kit being donated to/dumped upon Africa.

I would rather have access to a PC that could only run Win98/NT/2000 or stripped down GNU/Linux than no PC at all. If I want to learn some ICT skills, how am I going to do that with no hope of affording even an obsolete PC, let alone an up-to-date one?

The PCs supplied by Computer Aid *are being used* and there is clearly a continuing demand for them. They are helping kids in Africa (and elsewhere) to be computer-literate. They are breaking down the digital divide and taking another step towards levelling the playing field for these nations in the global economy.

Sure, it's only a small step - there are other aspects to this such as the generation & supply of electricity, and long-term it would be better for kids in the developing world to have access to the same spec PCs that our children do. And it would help if Computer Aid's website gave some reassurance about what happens to the PCs after they come to the end of their lifespan in Africa.

But don't knock what they are trying to do. If you don't think these old PCs are good enough for Africa then why not donate some you think *are* good enough?

I'd still be using NT4 if it wasn't for the fact that Microsoft refused to give it USB support. Runs great on old hardware (the minimum spec was roughly 66MHz and 12MB RAM, 120MB HDD)

I'm sure the charities offering XP at a fiver a go can get hold of NT4 licences from somewhere (or talk Microsoft into offering downgrade rights), for developing ICT skills you don't need anything more really, can stick OpenOffice or MS Office onto an NT4 machine fine.

One African leader who seems to be one step ahead of the game is Rhodesia/Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe. Good ole Uncle Bob has recently drafted some legislation making it COMPULSORY to have "monitoring facilities" in all IT equipment in the "now liberated land." No doubt his Chinese (PRC natch!) "technical advisers" are priming him on these technical do-dads, as the average Mugabe goon would be stumped by a crystal set! Those same nice Chinese gentlemen who no doubt facilitated the jamming of opposition radio stations who had the temerity to disagree with Uncle Bob. Wanna bet they put in more back doors in that there IT kit than Mossad ever did, and that was a LOT! Come back Sealous Scouts, all is forgiven!!!

Clearly what's needed is a promo tour, with a good slogan. In other words:

Don't junk it, give your PC to the Don't Junk Kit junket!