TCS - Refurbishing Computers

Refurbishing Computers

by Don Singleton
Tulsa Computer Society
From the June 2000 issue of the I/O Port Newsletter

Prior to the April 22 meeting 5 computers (a mixture of 386 and 486) were provided to the Restoration Church of God for use in their church and school, 3 computers (a 286, a 386, and a 486) were provided to the Harvest Christian Center, four printers and various parts were provided to the Supulpa VoTech, and 4 486s, 3 386s, 3 286s, and 5 dot matrix printers were provided to the Full Gospel Assembly in Turlock, California.

At the April 22 Refurbishing Computers meeting I took my old computer (the original "luggie") which I have been using to do the Sunday Voice Calls, to take care of a few problems I was having with it. It was overheating because the fan had developed problems, so we replaced the fan, and the color monitor was not working well, so I exchanged it for a mono monitor (since I certainly don't need color to run the Bigmouth Card. While we had it there, we removed the CD and two SCSI HDs, a 1gig and a 0.5gig, which we could really get much better use for in a machine to be donated, and we replaced it with a 200mb ide drive which is plenty for the Bigmouth system. We also removed a sound card and a modem, which were not needed for this application, but which can possibly be used in a refurbished machine for some non-profit.

Connie Hash from the First Presbyterian Church, 222 North Adams Road, Sand Springs, brought some parts they had had donated, and we were able to put them together into two operational machines (a 386 and a 486), and we are working to get three additional machines operational for a special Sunday School rotational program they have planned.

At the April 29th meeting a 486 with a VGA monitor was provided to the Tulsa Teen Challenge Outreach Center, and Connie Hash from the First Presbyterian Church in Sand Springs came hoping to pick up her machines. We were able to give her the operational 386, but the computer downloading the operating system apparently crashed in the middle of setting up the 486, and the people who were working on that were not there on the 29th so I did not know the status of that machine. It turns out that four 486s were set aside for her, but I did not know where they were, so she will pick them up on May 6.

We had originally scheduled Channel 6 to come in on the 29th to do a story on the operation, but because neither Brian, Jim, nor Gary were going to be able to be there (for different reasons), I asked them to reschedule for May 6.



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Tulsa Computer Society 5/05/2000
Don Singleton, President
djs@ionet.net