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Jarrett Mirkes is a
Peace Corp volunteer
working with Eliphas Kimathi Wiiliam,
Country Program Co-Ordinator of Book Aid Trust, in Nairobi, Kenya. Book Aid Trust
is an independently registered charity in Kenya, not affiliated with
Book Aid International in any way but their common mission is to develop Literacy
in Kenya through donation of books to public secondary schools. The
donated books from donors in America are used to establish libraries in public
secondary schools, because the gorvenment here does not allocate any public
funding to the establish the same, In so many schools there are no libraries at
all and we have very few trained librarians in
schools as well. Book Aid is trying to establish patnerships between donors and
schools to help build bridges that can withstand the test of times, in cognizant
of the fact that libraries are an intergral part of any quality educational and
teaching system.
Jarrett flew over to Tulsa
to learn how HelpingTulsa does computer refurbishing, and to help us to refurbish 40 computers,
including three laptops and two
Road Warrior machines (one with an ability to make additional
Road Warriors) with which they can set up a refurbishing
project of their own in Kenya. We worked for three very full days, and he then contacted a
shipping company to come pick up the computers, monitors, keyboards, and mice, together with
some additional items we donated to his project. He also found that
Gardner's Used Book store was willing to donate
some books to their project, so he arranged for them to be included in the shipment.
One of the problems we faced with this effort is we had about 20 Compaq Pentium II computers,
about 500 mhz, and none of our images would work on these machines (it would lock up in the
Windows 98se splash screen.
I tried a fresh install of Windows 98se,
and it still would not work, nor would it work with a (non-Compaq) Win2000
image we had from an earlier project. The HDs in these machines had
Win2000, but the logon screen had a password, and we had no idea what the password was. I
even contacted Compaq Tech Support to see if I could buy a restore CD for this model, but it
was too old, and they no longer had Restore CDs in stock. I asked on
Experts Exchange, but no one had any idea
how to get around the password. Finally I got a hint from another refurbisher on the
Tech Soup mailing list to try
this Offline NT Password
& Registry Editor. I tried it a few times before Jarrett got here, but it did not work,
and we tried it a couple of times after he got here, again without success, but finally we
did get it to work, so I was able to make an image of a Windows 2000 that would work on
these Compaqs, and then I made an image for an office environment, using PD software we
use on other images, and we put that image on several of the machines he is taking. We
got tired and did not get to all of the Compaqs, so we will have some machines to work on
once he leaves.
We have already been asked to put the principals of this project (Garrett and Kimathi)
in touch with Larry Yost and Guk Rut and the GARDOS
group that Larry is trying to get 225 computers together to
send to Sudan, since GARDOS has an office in Nairobi.
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