A few months ago I was asked to be part of a group at the County department in which I work which is doing disaster recovery planning.  Our name for it is COOP (or Contingency Of Operations Plan).  As part of the IT (computer) group, it was my responsibility to come up with a plan to have computers and phones prepared and stored offsite in case our office building is destroyed or damaged to the point that no one can get back in and get any equipment of supplies.  Considering that I had no budget for this, it was going to be a challenge.  However, being the curb shopper and lucky scrounge I am, it wasn't that difficult.

First I sent out an e-mail to all the other IT people in all the County departments to see if they had any computers and monitors they were planning on getting rid of.  An IT guy from a department just down the hall replied that he had a few PC's we could have.  A co-worker and I grabbed a cart and hot-footed it over to see what he had available.  We found several PC's and were about to leave with them when I noticed several boxes of what appeared at first glance to be laptops.  I asked about them.  "Oh," he said, "they are some tablet computers we had for a project a few years ago, but they were slow and no one liked them so we aren't using them anymore.".  My eyes lit up - "Ooh, can we take one and test it ?" I said.  "Sure.  he replied.  "We have docking stations, cases, extra battery chargers and even car chargers."    So Bob & I grabbed a couple with docking stations and power cords and headed back.   Needless to say, once we completely cleaned off the hard drives and reinstalled Windows and the applications we would need, they ran beautifully.  They had dual-core processors and 2GB of RAM!  Even have them running on the internal wireless network.  We took all 24 tablets and almost all the accessories (except the hard cases which we really didn't need).  Then a few days later I contacted the warehouse where County offices sent equipment they didn't want anymore and came up with plenty of keyboards and mice to go along with them.  Now all I need are phones (VoIP and expensive), network cables and power strips.  Still got a couple of weeks though so who knows...
 

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