Re: Added costings to pilot plan and resources

> Regarding maintenance of the donated PC's, you have a good point. I
> suggest the best thing to do is to maintian a stock of parts from
> butchered machines. It is inevitable that not all donated machines will

There is two ways going about this, in my mind.

1. Make sure the project gets huge - and order new parts per the container.

For instance, order 1000 casings, 1000 motherboards, 1000 flatscreens, 1000 
256 MB DDR modules. The motherboard should have 'everything' on board: sound, 
video, LAN, USB, IEEE1394, everything. 

Then make a project out of 'maintining and repairing CIS-computers'.

That is, let the students of some tech school learn by repairing, replacing, 
diagnozing these computers. Free repair and maintenance shop !

And 'order by the 1000' gives you a real nice price on things.

2. Make sure the project gets huge - and make sure you get 1000's of donated 
computers. 

Then make a project out of 'maintining and repairing CIS-computers'.
That is, let the students of some tech school learn by repairing, replacing, 
diagnozing these computers. Free repair and maintenance shop !

Oh, and then there's the third way: make sure your software contains enough 
drivers so that they can work on any old thin client. Or make it easy to 
generate new disks on the basis of brand, type etc etc.

>From your stock donated computers, it then should be easy to replace any 
broken computer. Just chug in a new one and throw the old one out or bring it 
to the 'CIS-repair shop'.

In my eyes, hardware is really not a problem if you have enough of it. And 
there IS enough of it. I visited places where they, for instances, collected 
ALL 'old' computer from ALL Shell offices in ALL of Europe. We're speaking 
of, at that time, close to 14.000 Compaq Prolinea 486 DX66. 

These kind of machines NEVER die. (Really). And if they die, toss it out the 
window and take a new one.

Of course, I hope my delusions of grandeur don't mess up the CIS-project 

_Ace

PS I am not saying it's *easy* to get 1000 donated computers - but if you have 
your software in place, and a Cis-repair shop in place, I am sure you can do 
mracles.

Reality Check:
PS2 looking for http://www.furbie.nl/. a foundation that refurbishes donated 
computers for schools in the netherlands, I find out that they stopped their 
activities. (You might use Google translate to try and understand why).

Actually, it may mean that there are more donated computers that are available 
for us