Good morning everyone. I am off to an early start this morning. have a little pc job for a freind replacing a chipset ban on an epox board and updating my freinds memory. Then its back to work on donation machines. I have a few custom machines going on right now and three of the Dells are ready to go to a new home. I will start getting pictures of builds and put them in blogs. Just have to figure out a way to make the fancy camera I got from new egg smaller. My wife is the photographer and she don't know how, but I am quite sure i will figure out a way.
We have had several machines going out lately a laptop to a lady in canada and a laptop to a lady in Lake Placid Florida. When I do the labor on these machines they are totally loaded and ready to use, with the newest possible operating system they will run. With windows 2000 pro on P3's they all have 512 megs of ram and with machines that are newer and support more memory we put a gig in them. Its no secret that xp and the protections needed to keep it clean and protected and running need more memory, and 512 just isn't enough. I have tons of free software that I use like Open Office, VLC media player for dvd's and a dvd cd writing program. A machine can be protected with the right tools and they are all installed on the machines. When one of the people we donate receives a machine it is ready to go add personsal stuff and your done.
The lady in Lake Placid needed mIRC setup for her so she could just double click on one icon and be in the cancer-survivors channel. She is not real computer literate and treatments have been so severe teaching her well has been difficult, as we are dealing with the emotions and her illness. I first got involved with cancer-survivors when my 5 year old son got leukemia ALL type which in little kids is very cureable but in teens and young adults very hard to deal with. Its been 14 years now and we are starting more support groups for more types of illnesses because its a proven fact that you get a lot more understanding from those that are going through it or have been there.
Please visit our websight and anyone wanting to donate old machines or parts and peices get ahold of root as he has my mailing address and all of my information. And of course anyone with any ideas on how to make this project easier or suggestions for our homesite at www.centralsupportgroups.com are very welcome. our domain of support groups it owned by our members and all vote on things and contribute their ideas to make things better for all. Most of our channel operators do not op themselves unless their is a problem as to not present a wall of ops to new people when they come in. I do run three linux bots in a botree in all channels to keep them open 24/7 and to also prevent flood attacks and takeovers. We pride ourselves on being a very secure and safe with our groups. We offer very safe and secure site for our members to meet and talk. many become very close and we have had two couples that met in the channel get married.
We have people in our groups that master all operating systems so provide technical support for Windows, Linux Ubuntu, and mac's. If a member gets a virus or exploit problem I personally help them rid it from their system by talking them through it on the phone and helping them set up their protections so it can be avoided for the most part. Thank god for rollover minutes, lol.
The computer donation project started about 5 years ago and has been growing every year. Most of the people we donate to have no idea they are getting a computer and don't know who we are. They are people found by our members and other sources like The Central Point School Board who recently donated two new Lexmark printers still in the box brand new. We send these computers all over the country and on occasion out of the country like Canada and the UK, with one going to Australia.
If everyone would take part in one project to help others even annonmously the world would be a far better place. As a disabled man it gives my life meaning and what uptime I do have is productive even though I can't work fulltime.
We are not a business, tax free entity or anything like that, this is just a project formed by The Cancer survivors support group to give more meaning to their lives knowing that even in the worst of health they are valuable to others, and can help others that have no other way to get a pc. Any kid jr high and up should have access to a computer at home for school and so many families can't afford one. It meens so much to those recipients to have a computer and be able to do better in school or just to get to the online supprt groups.
Please visit our website at www.centralsupportgroups.com under construction to learn more about us, the channels we have and are starting. You may know someone who needs to be in a support group, if so tell them about us. As I said before please contact Root about anything you may have to contribute and he will help ya. He has all my information.
For now I hope you all have a wonderful day, and I will try to blog at least every other day in the future now that I am getting the site pretty well figured out.
thanks again all
Ron Herman