Tony Bourke delivering laptops to Boxmoor Primary School, Hemel Hempstead.

Nobody likes to throw away a laptop just because it’s old. That’s why many of us have one in the cupboard.

We take donated laptops to fix, upgrade and refurbish as best we can into Windows 10 laptops and CloudReady ChromeOS devices.

Schools then tell us what they need to keep their pupils online when they are isolating or working from home.

So what’s the secret? Well, a team of dedicated unpaid enthusiast volunteers, some new high speed memory drives (SSDs) and a lot of tinkering! We can even reuse many components from broken laptops: keyboards, screens, batteries, memory and power supplies are often interchangeable to prolong the life of another laptop. “Two become one”, as they say in the song.

How you can help us…

Go on! Bring us your old laptops and we’ll give them a new lease of life in the hands of the younger members of our society. (A few of the laptops are older than their users!)

As well as laptops, we can also reuse tablets and smartphones for schools and other supporting organisations as listed below.

Click <<here>> for our wish list of what we would like to receive.

To recycle your item, simply send an email to recycle@computerfriendly.org.uk or phone us on 01727 617359.

Oh, if you are worried about any data left on your hard disk storage in your laptop, click <<here>> to see the shredder we used to destroy and recycle the old hard disks. All devices are wiped / factory reset.

The stats…

To date, we have delivered 405 devices made up of: 305 Laptops, 71 Tablets (58 iPads & 13 Android), 14 Desktops, 5 iMacs, 1 All-in-one PC screen, 1 Printer, 7 Smartphones.

These were delivered to 28 schools as well as Herts Police Domestic Violence team, Herts Leavers from Care, Luton Probation Service, Emmaus St Albans, Modern Victims of Slavery, The Vineyard, HAWA St Albans, Young People’s Support Team, Beds CC, Catholic Worker Farm, Watford.

That’s at least 833kg of equipment (nearly a tonne) that hasn’t ended up at the dump.

We estimate that between us we have saved 87,000kg of CO₂ (yes, 87 tonnes!) from being created, that’s equivalent to 89 Return transatlantic flights (based on new laptop CO₂ estimated by The Restart Project data).

Who have you helped so far?

Here are the names of some of those that benefited from your donations:

Last year Herts Advertiser published a complimentary article about what we were doing. Click here to read the article, and what Cathy Longhurst, headteacher at Mandeville School, said about how we help their students.

Once again, to recycle your item, simply email recycle@computerfriendly.org.uk or phone us on 01727 617359.