Over the past couple of months there have been a few announcements from companies touting 'simple' PC's for the elderly and those with no previous experience of computers. The latest of these is called Alex, from a business named The Broadband Computing Company.
I spent a bit of time looking at their offering today and, quite frankly, I'm less than impressed. The basic laptop provided costs £399.52. This provides a basic set of apps for web access, photo management, office suite, contacts, etc., wrapped up in a Janet & John GUI. On top of this, users have to pay an additional £9.99 per month for support, an email address and on-line backup storage. That makes the first year outlay just short of £520 - and that's before you add in the cost of broadband provision. An alternative way to get the package is by a monthly subscription of £39.95 on a two year minimum contract - that's £958.80 in total, which is pretty outrageous in my book. So I started to look at what sort of a set-up might be provided for considerably less outlay. The target I set myself was £250. The one thing I omitted from my costings was support. So far, the best deal I have come up with is the following: Acer Aspire R3600 Desktop PC Intel Atom N230 1GB RAM 160GB HD Wireless keyboard & mouse GeForce 9400 graphics card £149.99 +19" widescreen monitor £90 Total price £239.99 Add to this something like Ubuntu and the Eldy interface (www.eldy.eu) and you've got something pretty close to the system mentioned above, but at less than half the price. OK, so someone still has to put the thing together and show people how to use it, but as a community project aimed at the elderly or low-income families, this could be done by volunteers (LUG project?). So what I'm wondering is this: Is the idea feasible? Can it be done for even less money? Is there a better way to do it? There's something to think about! Dave _______________________________________________ Peterboro mailing list Peterboro@mailman.lug.org.uk https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/peterboro
