Chromebooks came up a little after I worked for the big Garseholes as a translator typing monkey. I didn’t believe the hype anymore and never bought one. But this looks like a good option if you happen to have one sitting around.
Chromebooks came up a little after I worked for the big Garseholes as a translator typing monkey. I didn’t believe the hype anymore and never bought one. But this looks like a good option if you happen to have one sitting around.
I’ve made a small hobby out of fixing up ewaste laptops and giving them away (recently to a local refugee resettlement org) and I’ve been frustrated at how quickly apple and Google kill their OSs. Everything I get that still has a valid, supported commercial OS gets factory reset and updated, because I try to give people something familiar to them. Everything else gets Linux Mint running MATE, which so far seems to be intuitive enough for former windows users.
These laptops have so much more life in them than their OS support would have you believe.
I’ve been thinking of doing something similar. Where do you source the ewaste laptops?
Originally an office rental company gave me permission to pick through their ewaste bins (they’re unsecured and provided with no guarantees, though I do take care to wipe any drives that haven’t been done already). From them, it was really inconsistent, sometimes I’d find brand new laptops, monitors, TVs, etc, because a company had to move suddenly or just upgraded and the laptops would be good quality and ready to go (once they already had the drives wiped and stacked in a second pile) other times they’d be stripped almost down to the motherboard, stained with coffee, and I’d have to buy a bunch of replacement parts to get them usable again. More recently, friends and relatives and neighbors have heard about this project and started giving me their old laptops to fix and give away. These tend to be working and cleaner than the ewaste ones, though a little anemic in RAM or hard drives. I had budgeted up to $35ish per laptop, so I buy whatever they’re missing used on ebay and ask for components on my local Buy Nothing page (which is where I originally was giving the computers away). If one laptop is already good, I’ll put it’s budget towards one of the problem ones.
Nice! I will start putting some feelers out with my local freecycle and buy nothing groups and see where to go from there. Thanks for the info!
Good luck!!