Linux saves the human race

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

Mark the day my friends, for today’s the day goodwill ceased being intangible and took its material form. Bask in the glory that is the GoodWill PC!

Anybody who’s been following the travails of the GoodWill PC knows it’s been something of a rocky road. When I was first tasked with scrounging a PC for free I was full of hope, convinced that they were ten-a-penny and I need only flash an amiable smile at a stranger for heaven to open up and shower me with PC bits.

Turns out things weren’t quite that simple and until a few days ago I was convinced I was going to fail this challenge. This depressed me because if I failed the entire concept of human kindness, generosity and compassion failed with me. So you see, I wasn’t just scrounging free stuff, I was trying to prove us worthy of our place in the universe. I was providing a guidepost to the soul. Yes, really.

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Goodwill PC won’t be rubbish after all… unfortunately

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

As the £250 challenge rumbles to its conclusion, the machines my rivals have managed to assemble for this princely sum have started rolling into the office. I must admit to a little PC envy, given that it looks as if I’ll be building my machine out of bad news, false hope and rejection. None of which is going to gift me the six months of victory gloating I so crave.

Just for those who don’t know, I don’t have £250 to spend. I don’t have anything to spend. Not a sausage. Which is lucky because you can’t spend sausages and would look very silly trying. My task is to deliver a PC to Tim for free.

I wrote recently about my travails on sharing site Freecycle, but at the back of my mind I wasn’t panicking because I had a masterplan. I say masterplan. I had a dump. Not even a dump. The promise of a dump. I envisioned myself clambering over mountains of PC bits, snatching sticks of DDR3 RAM from toothless beggars – no idea why – and generally constructing a supercomputer from other people’s foolishly discarded detritus.

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The Goodwill PC grinds to a halt

Friday, January 30th, 2009

So, the £250 PC Challenge. To bring you up to speed, while Tim was stuffing my colleagues’ underwear with £20 notes so they could run out and build their PCs, I was left to go cap-in-hand to see if I could build or acquire one for precisely zero pence. Before I explain my progress thus far, I’ll just recap everybody else’s for those who’ve not been following events:

As we speak motor-mouthed deputy editor David Fearon is bringing his unique bartering style to the shops on Tottenham Court Road in an attempt to wangle a £250 PC out of our tight-fisted neighbours.

The boy/beast that is staff-writer Mike Jennings has already assembled his stunted gaming PC and now spends most of his day making it watch eighties action movies in the hope that all this machismo will shame it into a spontaneous upgrade. The technology equivalent of putting hairs on its chest.

Taking inspiration from Gordon Gecko, David Bayon donned a power suit and simply glowered at the Internet until it offered him a cheap PC in exchange for leaving it alone. He’s currently puffing away on a large cigar and shouting “sell sell” at Darien Graham-Smith,  who hasn’t spoken since escaping the blatant falsehoods dwelling in the eighth level of hell that is Ebay. He now wears the look of a man standing in the ash at the end of the world, and we can only assume he’ll come back to us when he’s ready.

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