London Laptop Donation Drive - get involved here

#1

:laptop: About 9% of children in the UK – up to 1.8 million – do not have access to a laptop, desktop or tablet at home. Let’s help these kids in London.

Hi everyone,

As you may have seen, we’ve just launched a new campaign to support eight community organisations across London who are collecting, fixing and distributing laptops to school children across the city. You can find the all the details here:

If you’d like to support the campaign, there are three ways you can help out:

  1. Support our crowdfunder to help us repair and refurbish devices donated to our community partners

  2. Donate any unused laptop(s) you have lying around to your local community organisation - find in the top link, above

  3. Volunteer to repair donated laptops, preparing them for reuse (keep reading for more on this)

If you’d like to help repair donated laptops, you’re in the right place! We’re still working on our helpdesk system, which we’ll use co-ordinate this work. But in the meantime, please reply to this topic to let us know that you’re interested and in which area of London you’re based.

A huge thanks to everyone who’s already helped out :pray:

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#2
#3

Hi James
Thank You for your time on the Video call this morning.
Going forward I’d like to help out with the Laptop Drive, Happiest repairing basic faults, screens, HDD or SSD, Keyboard power conectors, fans etc. also happy to re-image the O.S / Configuration. Windows or Linux.
BR
Graham

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#4

Hi,

I’d be happy to repair devices for this cause! I am based in Croydon.

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#5

Welcome @Graham_Rolle and @Imran_Shaikh! Thanks so much for offering to help out. Watch this space for updates :+1:

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#6

I’d like to help with repairs - based in London N4

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#7

Count me in. Romford area.

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#8

I’m keen to help out. Can deal with screens, keyboards, drives, etc and install operating systems. Within range of Lewisham, and can alternatively work from base in Westminster.

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#9

Hello! My name is Monica Pinheiro and I am based in Orpington.
I would like to volunteer to this project, and I am looking forward to hearing from you guys soon!
Thank you!

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#10

Hi James , All
One thing I was going to suggest (And this may already be happening) all devices require some form of power supply, from experience any Mains cables or the Power Supply Brick need to be visually inspected and proven safe with a ‘PAT’ tester, To be able to pass on Laptop’s , Tablets etc. I assume that responsibility would be best with ‘our’ group, if left to schools or similar receiving groups it would mean our repairs / work wouldn’t be able to be passed on until proven to be safe electrically.
I wondered how this is being dealt with, anything you can point us towards? Or should we try and set something up ?

#11

If it’s any help, I have a PAT tester and for what it’s worth I’ve taken the relevant online “course”.

#12

:grinning: That’s good to know Roger, I’ve some experiance doing visual checks on the cables and ‘Bricks’ However I’ve never completed any course, was taught by the guys that came in to do my staff’s laptop checks, as they couldn’t keep up. was easy for me to precheck and give out new PSU & Cables if they looked in any way dodgy.
Lets see what James has to say as this may have been taken care of.

#13

Welcome everyone and thanks so much for offering to help! :clap:
We’re currently putting together a procedure at the moment and will be working with our community partners to figure out how best to make this work.

Thanks for raising the question of PAT testing @Graham_Rolle. This is something we already do at our regular community events and we’ll certainly be discussing it over the next few days.

Keep an eye on this topic for updates soon :+1:

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#15

I’d like to volunteer for this, I’m based in E17

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#16

hi james
i’d like to help out with this - i have some hardware experience and lots of software. i live in muswell hill north london but am not going on public transport at the moment. happy to walk up to about 5k to pick up/drop off stuff.

happy to help in any way, including helping with admin on the project…

ruth

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#17

Sign me up James! Happy to collect donated devices in Bromley and neighbouring boroughs, and contribute on laptop repairs.

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#18

I’ve just been catching up with the NEWS on TV,. Did anyone see the bit that mentioned Malware being on some of the laptops that had been handed out to help pupils with their school work?
I’m hoping these aren’t donated one’s

Question for James,
Do we have anything to work with in terms of donations at the moment, If so at lease checking these over physically has to be worthwhile, how are we doing with any procedural documentation?
Can we help in any way with this ?

#19

I can repair laptops and have volunteered with you before, Alex - London W2 3RA

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#20

Hi everyone! Thanks so much (again) for offering to help out. Here’s an update.

Our community partners have been receiving donated devices :tada: Meanwhile, we’ve been busy building our helpdesk system to handle repair requests and should have this up and running early next week.

At the same time, we’re also developing processes with our community partners for allocating repairs and transporting laptops. This work is still ongoing, but for now the key points are:

  • physical or challenging repairs will be allocated to volunteers who live within 5 miles of a partner organisation and who we know well through our community events or who were already involved in this work last year.

    The partner organisations who have asked for help so far are based in: Hammersmith & Fulham, Islington, Kensington & Chelsea, Lewisham and Westminster. More may come soon.

  • for everyone else, you’ll be able to help with triaging and advice-giving remotely.
  • we’re also investigating a way to help directly with software and boot-related problems remotely, but that may take longer to get set up, so bear with us.

These points will evolve as the project develops, but I hope they make sense to everyone for now. We’ll continue to post updates here.

Thanks again and do keep asking questions here if you have them :+1:

James

@Graham_Rolle, thanks for those questions. We have seen that coverage of malware-infected machines yes. From what we understand, the affected devices were provided by the government. But obviously, we’ll need to make doubly sure we check any donated machines for malicious software before handing them to schools.

Our community partners have been receiving laptops, yes. They each have some capacity for assessing and fixing these and mostly have procedures in place already. The idea is for us to expand their capacity to keep pace with donations. The procedures will be made available once the helpdesk launches next week.

#21

8 posts were split to a new topic: Schools find malware in government-supplied laptops - Windows vs Linux