Help yourself to a new high-performance desktop computer while helping children in Mexico?

by philg

Kids on Computers, a 501c3 non-profit that sets up computer labs in rural Mexico, got a brand-new high-performance desktop PC donated to it by Pogo Linux and Micron. This is being auctioned for the charity through eBay. See this page for details. (I’m not bidding on it myself because my PC was built less than a year ago.)

If you need a computer that boots instantly off a 480 GB SSD and want to help a good cause, this could be your solution!

3 thoughts on “Help yourself to a new high-performance desktop computer while helping children in Mexico?”

  1. Last time you posted about sending a Raspberry Pi to them, I waded through pages of info about what it is, and whether it’s actually useful, and how I can avoid paying the shipping via Amazon Prime. And then remembered I was at work and shouldn’t get distracted.

    This time I just sent money in 5 seconds via Paypal without looking at the PC which I don’t need. My exactly 5 yr old macbook pro is still running better than most of my brand new pc’s before it although with one video card replacement (turned out free eventually) and with some quirks/bugs I don’t like in the latest and greatest OS update.

    Is it not more efficient to have one machine with multiple VM’s/thin clients than a bunch of small computers? I imagine a basic set up would be fairly cheap.

  2. Hi lvl,

    Thank you for your donation. Greatly appreciated.

    We’ve done a lab with thin clients and came back the next year to find it non-functional. Kids on Computers labs are in very rural areas where kids do not have access to technology. This means there are very few teenagers and adults who are computer-savvy. They’re not able to troubleshoot if a client goes down or if there are server issues. This particular lab had 4 servers, and 12 thin-clients. If one of the servers needed to be rebooted, the school would just consider that server and its 3 children broken and put them in a corner.

    P.S. Apologies the Raspberry Pi donation process wasn’t self-evident. Thanks for the feedback. We’ll work on being more clear in the future. You can always reach me at avni at kidsoncomputers dot org.

    Thanks,
    Avni Khatri
    President, Kids on Computers

  3. Thanks for the explanation, makes perfect sense – complexity adds time and cost. Your donation process was pretty clear, I just wasn’t familiar with Raspberry Pi and started exploring.

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