[CAF Note: Bill Eitner of Computers for Everyone in East Palo Alto sent this note to his colleague Court Skinner. This is a great example of a not for profit that adds tremendous value to a community. If you want to support their efforts, learn more and donate here. If you want to learn more about Puppy Linux read on…]
You’d have been proud of me yesterday.
College age, maybe a little older, guy comes in with a P4 laptop. It doesn’t see the hard drive. I pull the hard drive and hang it on the mule. The mule sees it but coughs up a primary disk error. Reboot a couple of times–same thing each time. The hard drive is 20GB made in 2004. I quote $100 for another used drive and software. Customer says “I never use the hard drive for storage–always a flash drive.” That’s when I whip out the Slacko Puppy disk that I had burned the day before. Throw it in, boot it up, configure the wireless, and in all of about 3 minutes the computer is up and running with a Google page on the screen. I explained a few things to him and he was on his way for free with a working computer. He said he’ll be back when he gets a job. The whole interaction took maybe a half hour. An example of our mission in action possibly in its purest sense.
