RE: [school-discuss] This could work...

["HOWARD DANIEL-GVN674" <dhhoward@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hmm, several issues come to my mind about this as an option.  First, how
much electricity they use.  Even if we disconnected the CD ROM and FDD
drives, if it has a fan it would take more electricity than the HPs that
were spec'ed for Atlanta Public Schools.  Second, shipping all that
weight to Africa would definitely raise the total cost of acquisition,
even if they were acquired on eBay.  Finally, I'm hoping to develop a
model based on currently off the shelf equipment and services as a way
to show what is possible now in a scalable form.  As Doug points out,
finding a low cost  ISP solution could be the biggest hurdle here.
There appear to be a variety of ways the equipment could be funded from
my discussions with my teacherf, but a long term viable solution for ISP
is still something for which I'm looking.

That being said, William and I sadly watched when APS hauled the old
Compaq PIII Deskpro SFF's away from Brandon when they brought us our new
HP thin clients, because we knew those Compaqs could be put to good use
at a non pilot school.  You just hate to see it hauled away as junk when
it could be put to good use.

Daniel


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-schoolforge-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-schoolforge-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Michael
Shigorin
Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2007 1:44 PM
To: schoolforge-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [school-discuss] This could work...

On Mon, Jul 09, 2007 at 06:02:05PM -0400, Daniel Howard wrote:
> Thin clients: $150 each, 4 total for $600

Wow, we've had Compaq Deskpro EN SFF for $60 last time.
These are PIII-500/64M with ATI and PXE-capable (with current BIOS which
is available) Intel chips onboard, and even sound/CD-ROM/FDD.  These
seem to be available on ebay.

Guess it's much better than TCs for $150, especially that those Compaqs
weigh some 10kg/piece -- real iron which isn't gonna break that fast at
least physically ;-)