[BBLISA] Wanted: crappy old laptops

[Chris Palmer]

Greetings folks, 

I'm looking for donations of old laptops (ones that your company cycled out,
etc).  These laptops will only be used to display PDFs and word documents; they
do not have to be at all special performancewise.

The donations would be tax deductible, and will go to benefit the Lexington HS
Debate team, and indirectly the environment.  

Email me separately if you or your company would be willing to donate
laptop(s).  We're looking for a bunch of them (20 would be perfect).  They can
certainly be a hodgepodge of hardware and OSen.  

-Chris

THE EXPLANATION:

You probably know that in my other life, I'm a debate coach.  Traditionally
debate consumes massive amounts of paper; each debater would bring a large
Rubbermaid tub full of evidence, cuttings, speeches, and other material to
every tournament.  That's a lot of printouts, and recently, a lot of airline
baggage fees too. 

Recently debate teams have started to convert to paperless debate.  That means
all the evidence is kept on laptops.  The catch is, you also must provide your
opponents in a debate round with copies of the evidence and positions you read
so they may prepare to refute them.  With paper copies, that was trivial; with
electronic stuff, it isn't anymore.  Passing around jump drives is time
consuming and failure prone, especially among not particularly tech savvy
debaters and kids.  Not all opponents can be expected to bring their own
laptops to tournaments at all. 

The accepted solution is that paperless teams must provide a "viewing computer"
to their opponents loaded up with the evidence and material they are going to
present in the round.  That's what we're asking for here, is laptops to use for
viewing, which is why they don't have to be very good. 

Thanks!

-C