Today we restored our network and Internet access. We thought we'd celebrate by posting a long-overdue update.

Our volunteer program continues to expand. We've been seeing a lot of new faces in the space every week-- a few weeks ago, we had a record 8 new volunteers, on top of the half dozen returning. We love to meet new people and can always use more help, so come down and get your hands dusty!

We recently dropped our base price for a FreekBox to $40 (from $50). Two Jacksons will now get you a complete computer system that's completely adequate for Internet, word processing, and other basic use. We've also been getting a steadier stream of Pentium 4-generation hardware, so we almost always have some of these newer, power-hungry systems for sale. They also work great as space heaters!

We get a lot of questions about laptops. We have been sitting on a a number of donated laptops for some time now. With our Internet back up and a method for going through them, we plan on devoting a lot of cycles to processing laptops in the coming weeks. Please call us to determine availability.

As always, we need hardware donations to continue our volunteer program, especially with more volunteers coming in every week. If you have a tower sitting in your closet, or if the PC-100 in your parts box seems to be getting more and more obsolete, bring it to us, and it will be reused or recycled in an environmentally friendly and educational program. Better yet, if your work just upgraded its employees' PCs and is trying to figure out what to do with the old ones, mention us to your IT department. As always, we struggle to find the most stringent recycler around to process the materials we can't use, so the materials will never end up sent to the developing world in toxic trade. We also ensure NSA-level data destruction on all donated hard drives.