What are your longer term goals, how are you going go to pay your rent/bills, are you hoping that donations will do this are that you can built a reputation/experience and eventually go commercial?

I actually did a similar thing about 7 years ago for a year, worked at a charity that took in old equipment and passed it onto the community. I was surprised that there were quite a few people of all ages(mainly elderly) that were completely computer illiterate.

We generally had a small cache of hardware and would swap parts around to build half decent PC's.

As was said though your real problem is liability and new parts, if you took apart a laptop for example and shorted the motherboard it could cost you £150-300 for a new motherboard and then a few days to arrive. Where are you going to get new parts for cheaper prices what happens if you order the wronf part, what happens if the part your ordered is broken. You have no have no industry contacts for wholesale prices.

PC repair shops have a cache of parts in stock.

You could run into a lot of issues and people hate parting with money I'm afraid. It's an honorable idea however but you'd need a bulletproof disclaimer.

WE WILL TRY TO FIX IT BUT IF WE BREAK IT THEN TOUGH COOKIES!

1. Will you donate to a non-profit organization involving free PC/Laptop repair?

2. Do you think this is a good idea?

3. Are there any pros/cons you see in this company?

I'm a firm believer in "you get what you pay for" so I never use free services.

I actually did a similar thing about 7 years ago for a year, worked at a charity that took in old equipment and passed it onto the community. [...] We generally had a small cache of hardware and would swap parts around to build half decent PC's.

That's an idea I can get behind: Receiving donated devices, repairing them, and donating them to people or organizations that need them.

Providing computers and tech support to charities and schools especially makes sense - also doing website design and maintenance for them. Most small charities or individual missionaries I know, who do great work and actually help alot of people, their websites are terrible - they just don't have time to deal with them, which means they get let donations, because often times the website makes it unintentionally hard to donate through. And hard to find information. And hard to understand what they actually do.

maybe not,

i mean, you casn make a bit off the parts and stuff,

but to me it kind of sounds like the stuff con artists say to gullible people to make them feel friendly and trust them.. do something good and all.

then again, some people talk a lot of crap anyway,

exercise caution with this individual

I don't let other people touch my computers. If it's busted, I fix it myself.

Well, that too.

Probably the wrong forum to be asking this question because I assume everybody on here is fairly technical minded and already do their own repairs, upgrades and probably build their own computers in the first place. The people who don't are probably using a Mac or a tablet.

Probably the wrong forum to be asking this question because I assume everybody on here is fairly technical minded and already do their own repairs, upgrades and probably build their own computers in the first place. The people who don't are probably using a Mac or a tablet.

You're probably right about that. I was trying to find an answer on what should I do. I need to think about this and do more research on this idea.

A word of warning from someone who's done this before (building scrap boxes for charity):

Computer components have special disposal fees in some places, and if you're unlucky enough to live in such a place then you're going to end up being a a dumping ground.

Hope you like 100MB hard disks.

The long and short of it economically speaking is that you're going to spend more value in time than you're going to produce in product. That is, you'd be better off getting a minimum wage job and spending the same amount of time working there, then just buying low-end PCs.