The HeliOS Project is now.....

The HeliOS Project is now.....
Same mission, same folks...just a different name

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Friday, October 21, 2011

I Can't Believe It's Almost Here

We Central Texas denizens, after weeks of straight 100+ degree weather, have just experienced our first cool front of the year.  It was welcome with or without rain.  This summer has been the most brutal in Texas history and it spawned the largest wildfire ever recorded in the state.  The final count?  1500+ homes destroyed and the cost of this catastrophe is in the billions.

So after this, a cool front is a blessing.  But it served as a reminder to us HeliOS folks of one thing...

Christmas.

Last year as Christmas approached, we crossed from apprehensive to accepting the fact that we would not meet the annual hard increase for computers.  With only a couple of weeks before Christmas, St. Jude Medical stepped forward with a 70 laptop donation and we were able to fulfill all requests.  We did 19 installs in the last 4 days.

I personally did 3 installs on Christmas Day.  It was an extremely good day.

We've had a good year for equipment donations this year, but we've also been challenged several times within that year.  Most recently, we found ourselves in an Autism resource database that all but wiped us out of equipment and resources.  Last week, we found ourselves without gas money to do any deliveries.  Fortunately, some good Ebay sales came through and we got out of that jam.

Unfortunately it did leave our cupboards all but bare.  We have about 19 machines that are repairable, maybe 15 monitors and mostly empty RAM bins.  We predict at least double that in requests this holiday season

If you are local and work for a company that is close to doing a computer refresh, please let them know that we will most certainly take those machines off their hands.  For the record, we did approach Dell about this but the best they could do was offer to sell us refurbished ones at their listed price.

How special.

At any rate, the season is almost upon us and we need to gear up for it.  If you have video cards, RAM (especially PC2 4200 1 giggers), USB flash drives, old laptops or desktops, please keep us in mind.  We do have minimum requirements for machines and you can see those here.  If you care to make a financial donation, you can do so as well electronically here.  Your donation will go towards component purchases or fuel for delivery vehicles.

We will do our best to get your donations into the hands that need them most.

And as always, thanks for helping us do what we do.

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