I was recently brought in an old laptop to fix for one of the school's staff - as a favour sort of thing. It turned out to be an old Pentium 1, 133Mhz with 32Mb of RAM and it was running Windows 98 SE. Now this caused me to have to think way back to when I last supported these sort of machines in anything more than a 'OMG you have a machine that old' manner. The thing was, after mentioning how old it was to the staff member, the response was 'it does the job just fine'.
It got me thinking, with the ever present push for faster, sleeker, more 'feature-rich' computers, are we forgetting the actual purpose of a computer? Being blinded by gimmicks and shiny features we will never use? Many will go to a shop and spend £1000 on a PC that they will only ever browse the web on and email their brother. Would we do the same for a car? Would we spend £10,000 on a car that we are only going to drive to the corner shop with? I doubt it.
It makes me think that there is a major gap in the PC market. This gap being a well structured second-hand/refurbished PC company. We have many little shops that sell the occasional pc, but no-one 'big' like PC World or Dell.
If this market were combined with an OS which is up to date, namely Linux, it would be an excellent way of getting computers into the homes of those who can't afford to go out and buy the latest and greatest.
Furthermore, it would be another way of reducing the environmental damage caused by old PC's. True, this company wouldn't provide CRT monitors as they use far too much electricity, but there are plenty of refurbished TFT's around from liquidating companies etc...
So, this is to one of you 'venture capitalist' types or someone with money to invest somehow. How about looking into this?
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