TCS - Refurbishing Computers

Refurbishing Computers

by Don Singleton
Tulsa Computer Society
From the April 1997 issue of the I/O Port Newsletter

On February 22 Robert Krumel, James Kirkpatrich, Patricia Sealey, Paul Botsford, and Bruce Carson came to help refurbishing computers, and on March 1 Armando Giacometti Jr, Dave Knox, Gordon, Maralyn, and Becky Leaman, Rod Rainsell, John Parker, A T Hibbard, Richard Leon Davis, Joe and Airyn Cristiano, Robert Krumel, and James Kirkpatrick showed up to help. Actually those are the ones that signed the log; I actually believe there was at least one more present, and that is God, who brought representatives from four other non-profit groups who were doing similar activities, to join with us to help in what we were doing. We had a member of the board of Operation Hope, an ecumenical ministry focusing on discipling men and women in prison and helping them upon release, a representative of Bethesda Boys Ranch in Mounds, Pat Hibbard, a volunteer with Youth Services of Tulsa, a short term shelter for children 12 - 18, who comes into Tulsa to spend three hours giving blood platlets at the Red Cross, and who then comes over to help us, and Rod Rainsell from Cookson HIlls Christian Ministries from the town of Kansas, Oklahoma, who saw our plea in last month's paper for monitors, keyboards, and cables, and who brought so many monitors and keyboards that it boggles my mind how he got them all in his car.

We spent an extremely productive day, with one crew of volunteers checking out the monitors we had, plus the ones from Cookson Hills, and then checking out the keyboards as well, so we now know the exact status of all monitors and keyboards. We also had another crew going through a CD I brought with shareware and PD educational software, to try to put together a TCS Suite of software that we will load on each machine that we are going to send for children to use.

We worked unsuccessfully on the monitor I described last time that looses sync in DOS after it heats up, but works fairly well in Windows. We are hoping that the TV Technician that helped us out on Feb 22 will return with his tools, because I think that monitor will need his help. We also wasted some time trying to add a hard disk and card from a dead machine to a donated 386 made by AT&T. It did not work, but we are not sure the card and/or disk were any good. We need to set up a team checking out individual parts in machines that will not come up as a complete system.

We really have some extremely wonderful people helping with this project; people who will give of themselves without expectation of receiving anything except a little education on how to work on computers. It makes me feel very good, after spending a few hours, in the presence of people like that.

We donated two of the monitors from Cookson Hills to Youth Services of Tulsa, to finish out a couple of machines they had donated without monitors, and in return Pat Hibbard is going to bring disks with some of the PD educational software she is loading on those machines in the shelter, to add to the suite of educational programs we are going to put on each machine we refurbish that will be used by children.

If you have any PD or Shareware Educational Software, please bring it with you to the meeting on Mar 22, because we have three or four computers that are ready to be released, as soon as we can get some Educational software on them. We then will have the table space to check out some of the computers that Cookson Hills brought, plus some other machines that some of the other volunteers provided. If anyone still has any 5-1/4 1.2mb disks we could use them too, so that we can generate a set of disks with the educational software suite for each machine we send out.

We will meet again on March 22, March 29, April 5, and April 26. If you are free, and have some experience working on computers or monitors, or if you would like to work with people who have such experience and perhaps learn from them, then please join us. I will not be able to be here for the April 5 meeting, but I am sure the team can make it without me.



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Tulsa Computer Society 03/10/97
Don Singleton, President
tcs@galstar.com