We take peoples old laptops and get them ready for new homes at the Makery.
To do that we need to wipe the hard drives and put on a new operating systems. The easiest way to do that is to put a linux operating system on instead of windows. It also avoids the ongoing problem of laptops being slow and getting viruses.
A lot of the laptops we have are older ones that still work but are not very fast. For this reason they are jokingly called craptops and marked with a poo emoji sticker.
Things to know about Craptops if you are taking one from the Makery
Donations are welcome for laptops especially you were going to spend more somewhere else. But do take it away and use it first and come back to tell us how you are getting on with it. If it works well please do give us a donation even if it is £5 if you are low on money.
The computer are running some kind of Ubuntu instead of windows. If you need specialist software this might not work for you. They have the following software on them.
- Chrome and Firefox web browsers for the Web – most things can be done on the web now as well like Office 365 from Microsoft and Google Docs.
- VLC video and audio player
- Gimp for photo editing and image making.
- Libre office for office documents, Word and Spreadsheets etc.
You can normally get quick help on using the computer on a Saturday, Friday or Wednesday evening drop in from Mick at the Makery.
Operating Systems we install.
We install different versions of debian-based linux. Depending on the ability RAM / CPU of the computers and what they are used for.
- Ubuntu – higher performance
- MATE – mid performance
- Lubuntu – low performance