"Find A Computer A Home" History and Computer Recycling

History

FACAH was initially called "Find A Clone A Home" and was started by Mr. Les Fairweather in 1994 in the western communities of the Victoria area. He began his volunteer charity to provide computers for those who needed them and computer repair training for those without employment. On Mr. Fairweather's passing Jim Butler took up the baton to continue the work in 2000 and Larry Gagnon joined Jim in early 2004.

Recycling Older Computers

It is a disturbing fact that over 25,000 computers find their way to recyclers every single day in the USA alone. Imagine what that number is worldwide. The even sadder fact is that many of those computers are perfectly usable. There is a very disturbing consumerist mentality (propagated by the commercial software and hardware industries) that attempts to convince consumers that they need faster and better computers every 3-4 years in order to be able to run the latest operating systems and software. This is a fallacy. 95% of computer users only use 10% of most software's features. There are usually a number of alternative, lighter-weight software applications and faster operating systems which will more than serve the users purpose. A well-maintained, virus and spyware-free, 10 year old computer with sufficient memory and hard drive space is still more than capable of browsing the Internet, sending emails, word processing, listening to and downloading music, viewing and storing photos, chatting with friends, etc.