Saving the Earth, One Laptop at a Time

There have been a lot of benefits of cleaning out the house.  The Lego sets have done well on Ebay.  We've found several items that the Heinisch children could put to good use and we have enjoyed the memories that sorting through everything has brought.  One big benefit has been finding items that we forgot we had and enjoying them now.  Tonight we were able to use the fajita maker that had been tucked away in the buffet.  Doug and I didn't quite remember how we got it, but once we found it, we knew that we had to use it for dinner this evening.

Last week, I was cleaning out the closet in the mud room when I ran across one of our old laptops.  We hadn't used it since last spring when Cameron downloaded a game on it.  As I got it out to decide what I was going to do with it, I  remembered that my dad had thought about getting one.  His computer had stopped working and he needed to have one for his role as president of the town council.  I called him right away to see if he wanted me to try and set it up for him.  He was definitely interested, so I began looking at what I needed to do to make it functional for him.  I first checked to see if it would connect to the internet.  I was pleased to see that it had no problem connecting, and then started the tedious process of uninstalling any programs on it that were unneeded.  Once I got AVG off of it and a few programs from my teaching days, it began to run a lot faster.  After cleaning up the programs on the laptop, I turned to the pictures and videos that I had stored on it.  It took awhile to save everything to a few flash drives, but this week I finally got everything transferred.

I took the laptop over to my dad's a few days ago.  We signed the laptop into his wifi and got him set up with a Microsoft account.  I was pleased that it ran quickly and soon he was on Google checking his emails.  I showed him how to use Google docs and then we checked to make sure it would work with his printer.  The only downside was the battery life.  It was shorter than I would have liked, but he didn't mind.  He would be able to charge it by his chair.  Hopefully, this will work for him this year.  If so, it will save him some money.  He asked me if I wanted anything for it, but I didn't.  I just was happy that he could use it and that we found a place for one more item in our home.