Thrive Northox is able to re-purpose used laptops which we then pass on to children and teens in the OX7 area to support their home learning.
Do you have a laptop you no longer use? Find out how to up-cycle it with Thrive Northox by watching our short video here.
Donating your laptop to Thrive Northox
Before handing over your laptop, we need to check a few things and to help us do this, we would like you to take some photographs of your computer and email them to us. Here is a short video on how to do this. Or just keep reading:
Stickers on the front of your laptop:
In particular, any sticker with “Intel” written on it will tell us useful information about the processor inside the device..
Stickers on the back of your laptop:
Especially those which start with the name of the manufacturer. The top right hand sticker here is giving information about the Acer it is attached to.
Your laptop will have stickers in different places to the ones shown here. Don’t worry about that, just photograph them anyway and if in doubt, just sent us a picture of all the stickers you can find and we’ll do the rest.
Email your photographs to us
Please make sure the photographs are clear enough for the writing to be readable.
Once you have them, please email your pictures to us at contact@thrive-northox.co.uk. We’ll take a look at them and if we are able to make use of your computer, we will be in touch to arrange for safe collection or drop-off.
Before handover
Your laptop needs to power up when you press the press the On button. If it will not power up, it may be that it needs to be charged if it hasn’t been used in a long time. Try leaving it on charge for an hour or two before attempting to power on again. We regret that we cannot accept laptops that do not come with a power cable and which do not power up without the cable once charged.
We securely remove all personal data from donated laptops, there is more information on this below. We do not need to know the password for your laptop to wipe the data. Note that the upgrade process will delete all existing data, files and any installed software. It is a one-way ticket, no data will be preserved so do remember to make your own copy of any any precious documents or family photos.
Finally, we would request that you make the laptop clean and tidy by wiping it over with an anti-bacterial wipe.
We can also accept Apple Macs.
Removing your personal data
If you wish to do this yourself, you will find guidance on the internet. Our dedicated team of volunteer engineers are very busy upgrading and distributing donations, so sadly, we don’t have the resources to be able to support you through this process.
Once we receive a donated laptop, we use a piece of software called DBAN to physically wipe every bit of data from the hard disk. Unlike simply formatting the hard disk, deleting files, or installing another operating system, this irreversibly destroys all data on the disk, making it impossible for anyone to ever recover it. DBAN has been around for many years and is one of the most stable and widely used disk wiping tools in the world. There are many sites listing it as a go-to resource, for example:
https://helpdeskgeek.com/free-tools-review/5-free-programs-to-completely-wipe-a-hard-drive/
https://helpdeskgeek.com/free-tools-review/5-free-programs-to-completely-wipe-a-hard-drive/