Ongoing Project

The Tulsa Computer Society's HelpingTulsa Computer Refurbishing project certainly refurbishes computers, just like many other groups. In fact at the time I am writing this we have refurbished 1581 computers to date (501 since last year's competition).

But more important that refurbishing computers in Tulsa, some of which were distributed in the Tulsa area, and some went as far as Nairobi, Kenya and Belarus, Russia, a primary objective of HelpingTulsa is to create new computer refurbishing projects. Some of these have been in the Tulsa area, but many have been in other cities, so that those projects could take old computers in their area that other wise would be going to land fills, and refurbishing those computers for donation to worthy recipients in their area.

There is a saying, "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life". Our varaition of this is: "Fix an old computer for a man, and he will have a computer that will fill his needs for a while. Teach a man to fix computers, and he will have a computer for the rest of his life, and he can fix computers for his friends and neighbors."

We have helped set up at least 17 Computer Refurbishing projects around the world, providing them with Image Machines or Road Warriors and training on how to do it.

How We Did It

Some of the people who come to us to learn how to computer refurbishing learn about us from our HelpingTulsa website, others have learned about us from TechSoup, or word of mouth. It does not matter to us. What we say is if you will come to Tulsa, Oklahoma for two to three days and learn how we do what we do, we will give you a Road Warrior or two to take home, so you can set up your own project like ours.

Our How To files are online at http://helpingtulsa.org/howto. Some of these pages were in the How To we submitted for last year's Jerry Award competition, and some are new this year. The pages which are new this year are shown in red. Pages which have been made obsolete by our development of the Road Warrior to replace the Image Machine are shown greyed out. The information is still there, and might be of use to someone to see how our project developed over the years, but with the exception of some of our first projects which are still using the Image Machine, they don't reflect the tools we are using today. The normal links, which are neither red nor grey, represent pages which existed last year, even though they may have been updated so that the information is current.

Our How To files are on every Road Warrior, so even if a worker does not have his machine connected to the internet, he can open Internet Explorer, and it will open with our How To files. Each Road Warrior also has our collection of Driver files, so even if a worker does not have his machine connected to the internet, he can find most of the drivers he may need to refurbish a computer.

Obtain Software

The requirements for the Jerry Award say that we must show where to obtain all of the software we used. This information is documented in the How To files, in other words as each program is described there is a link to either download that program, or to information on how one can find it. The entire Road Warrior can be downloaded here.

Logo

We do not care what our projects use for a logo, but we offer to create a graphic for them that they can use on the wallpaper of the machines they refurbish. Here are some of the logos that groups have selected:

Note on the bottom line one of the groups we have helped get started in Superior Nebraska has itself started satellite projects in other cities, some time involving an association with another NonProfit, such as the YMCA.