When?

Thursdays from July 1st

Where?

St Albans – St Pauls Church,
Harpenden – 12 Southdown Road (Quaker Meeting House),
Marshalswick Baptist Free Church (TBC),
Flamstead – The Spotted Dog (TBC),

How do I Book?

Phone: 01727 617359 Mon, Weds and Friday between 10am and 1pm
Leave a message at other times and we’ll call you back
Email: courses@cfsta.org

Will it be safe?

We will be following Govt guidelines and more: Observing Social distancing. Everything (including devices) will be sanitized. Volunteers will be wearing masks. There will be Perspex screens. Volunteers will have had a recent negative Covid test result.

What problems can you help with?

Just about everything, but our bookers will ask for some details when you make your booking.

Can I just Drop In?

No. For the moment you must book a 30min slot – we cannot accept walk-ins.

St Pauls Church Blandford Road, St Albans, AL1 4JP
Marshalswick Baptist Free Church Sherwood Avenue, St Albans AL4 9QL
12 Southdown Road (Quaker Meeting House) Harpenden AL5 1PD
The Spotted Dog 8 High Street, Flamstead AL3 8B

Tony Bourke delivering laptops to Onslow St Audrey’s School, Hatfield

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

What if we told you there are hundreds of school kids crying out for a laptop? No surprise, right.

But what if we told you that those same school kids could use your old laptop? That’s a real surprise!

Computer Friendly has provided over 200 laptops to schools in the first 10 weeks of 2021 alone and we have just made 100 devices more ready-to-go!

We take donated laptops to fix, upgrade and refurbish as best we can into Windows 10 laptops and CloudReady ChromeOS devices. Schools choose the types they need to keep their pupils online during lockdown and beyond.

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 in hospitals, vaccination centres and care homes.

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…

Reuse / recycling is good for the environment. As of 16^th March 2021 Computer Friendly have

That’s at least 670kg of equipment (⅔ tonne) that hasn’t ended up at the dump.

We estimate that between us we have saved 72,000kg of CO₂ (yes, 72 tonnes!) from being created (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:

On 8 February, 2021 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.