Computing for less than 80 cent a day
From the Dell Irish website , you can get a good PC for under 570 euro, as of this writing. This includes the machine, the operating system, the three year hardware warranty and three years of virus protection. This means that for under 570 euro you get three years protected computing with peace of mind. The system runs the latest version of Microsoft's operating system, which leaves you future-proofed for the lifespan of the PC, and has more than enough memory and hard drive space to run it. For further information on the constituent parts of a computer and what these do, see our article "what to look for in a PC ".
This is what your money gets you:
PROCESSOR Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core E2160 Processor (1.8GHz,800MHz,1MB cache)
OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows Vista® Business - English
SUPPORT SERVICES 3Yr Basic Warranty - Next Business Day for the price of 2Yr
MONITOR 17in E178WFP WIDESCREEN UK/Irish Black (1280X800) with TrueLife TCO99 DVI-D
MEMORY 2048MB 667MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM [2x1024]
HARD DRIVE 160GB (7200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive with 8MB DataBurst™ cache
GRAPHICS CARD Integrated Intel® Graphic Media Accelerator X3100
OPTICAL DRIVE 16x DVD +/- RW Drive
KEYBOARD Dell™ Entry Quietkey USB Keyboard - UK/Irish (QWERTY)
MOUSE Dell 2 Button USB Optical Mouse
Services & Software
SECURITY SOFTWARE Norton™ Internet Security™ 2008 - 3 Year Protection - English
Accessories
MICROSOFT SOFTWARE Microsoft® Works 9.0 - English
SOUND SOFTWARE Integrated 7.1 Channel High Definition Audio
Also included with your system
Dell System Media Kit Resource DVD - (Diagnostics & Drivers)
Shipping Documents English Documentation with UK/Irish Power Cord{mospagebreak}
And now the software:
All the software below is open source and freely available for download from the Internet. The selection of products below will cover the business needs of most charities, but if you need more, look at www.sourceforge.net which hosts nearly 200,000 open source projects.
Email client: Mozilla Thunderbird
Internet Browser: Mozilla Firefox
Word Processor: OpenOffice Writer
Spreadsheet: OpenOffice Calc
Presentations: OpenOffice Impress
Database: OpenOffice Base
Photo Editing: GIMP
Logo design: Inkscape
Record audio: Audacity
Accounting: GNUcash
CRM: SugarCRM (community edition)
PDF writer: included in OpenOffice.org
Anti-virus is included with the PC
A compression utility (like WinZip) is included in Windows
Windows Media Player will play audio and video and is included in Windows
Lastly, you can get a free PDF reader from Adobe. This is not open source, but Adobe do give it away for free. And you can get a PDF writer, PrimoPDF which will write data from any application for free from the web.
Nifty and Thrify
In conclusion, you can get three years solid computing with all the bases covered for less than 200 euro a year: which is about 80 cent per working day. So that leaves the question: can you afford not to equip your charity with the tools to become more efficient?
N.B. Dell is used as an example in this article. Neither ICTpoint nor The Wheel specifically endorse Dell computers over any other manufacturer. For comparison purposes, Komplett also do a very similar machine for a very similar price, as of this writing.
