Hi all! I've volunteered myself at a youth charity- to share my love and knowledge of code with disadvantaged kids. A lot of kids are keen- but we currently only have a couple of PCs I'm based in Sydney, and the PCs would just need to run Linux. I'm wondering if anyone has a suggestion on where/how to source them? Or better still, does anyone have/work in a company with lots of old PC's they're getting rid of? Cheers
Best bet is to approach a whole bunch of private schools. They usually do the three year upgrade cycle path for computers. Thus end up with old (but usually working) full computers. They either have a company that comes to collect, or they have it pilled up in some room somewhere. Some of them will probably look at this is you doing them a favor for getting rid of the stuff that has already been written off the books.
Australia has a federal recycling scheme for 'e-waste' that is probably a good starting point. https://www.environment.gov.au/prot...very/television-and-computer-recycling-scheme There are four companies authorised in the scheme. https://techcollect.com.au/ https://epsaewaste.com.au/ https://www.ecyclesolutions.net.au/ https://mri.com.au/dropzone/ I'd also contact local councils as they may have some kind of community scheme or warehouse that you might scounge some up with. There are also some places like https://workventures.com.au/ that will have low cost pcs. I know there's a Computerbank Victoria that might have helped but I don't think there's any NSW equivalent that I know of.
Some of the Work For The Dole schemes up here in BananaLand used to have a few areas that did PC overhauls for donations, you could try asking around those as well perhaps.
You can find bulk lots of office desktops (e.g. Dell OptiPlex) on eBay relatively cheaply. You could also look at getting a Connecting Up account to buy cheap refurbished computers (https://www.connectingup.org/discounts/33408?sort_by=sell_price&items_per_page=All).
Worth checking out this thread... https://forums.overclockers.com.au/threads/what-do-you-do-with-legacy-office-hardware.1263817/