This evening I sent an email to a teacher at my sons school, the contents were simple just really a composite list of the equipment that I’ve managed to secure for him to refurbish and send to schools in Africa. The equipment would be going for secure destruction otherwise, so at least someone will have a chance of getting some more use out of them.
It’s likely that there will be more equipment available, that is more than the 50 or so systems that I’ve already managed to secure. Strange that technology becomes disposable so quickly when all things are considered, when this equipment was purchased it was state of the art – now it’s considered suitable for use as a paper weight.
Unfortunately all these systems will be delivered without hard drives, these have already been destroyed – a great waste. However the data that they contained would be extremely valuable to some people and could have potentially used the information to compromise a part of the banking system that a great many people depend on. The security of the data is paramount as far as this company is concerned, even a low level format is not considered sufficient to delete the data – although with 464 hard drives already destroyed and quite a few still to go – time may have been an issue.
Still I’m sure that these systems have a future, even if there is only a couple of years of life in them. They will bring technology to somewhere it wasn’t before, you never know what may come from a gift like this – for the recipients it could be life changing.