Excalibur continues to support South Swindon MP’s Local Laptop Scheme and refurbished four laptops for BEST – Be A Better You, a registered charity to help young people supported with different social, emotional and mental health barriers. The equipment was donated by Catalent and refurbished by the IT team at Excalibur.
Excalibur’s IT Deployment Specialist, Luke Shaw, says: “Many businesses upgrade their equipment before they’re end of life due to contract renewals or systems upgrades. It’s great for Excalibur to get our hands on this perfectly useable kit and repurpose it for use by charities or children who would otherwise not have access to good, up to date laptops. So far, we have refurbished over thirty laptops. We make a huge effort to encourage our clients to recycle their outgoing equipment as its good for the local community and the environment.”
Donated laptops are received at Excalibur’s head office in Swindon and assessed by a team of trained hardware engineers. Equipment is sorted into piles of working and non-working hardware. The working laptops have their hard drives wiped of all data and uploaded with an up-to-date copy of Windows in preparation for their new owners. Laptops that cannot be repurposed are safely disposed of via a specialist IT waste disposal company.
Speaking about the successful campaign, South Swindon MP Sir Robert Buckland said: “I am extremely grateful to Catalent, as well as the many local residents who have donated laptops, not to mention the brilliant teams at Excalibur and SP Computers who have stepped up at such a difficult time and repaired hundreds of devices.”
This is the latest Swindon charity to benefit from the local scheme. To date, around 60 laptops have been donated to school children across Swindon through the scheme.
Local businesses including Excalibur joined forces with MP Sir Robert Buckland to take in donated devices for refurbishment and re-use. The scheme originally began life as the ‘Laptops for Local Schools Campaign’ which ran alongside the government’s “Get Help With Technology Scheme’ in January 2021.
Other organisations that have benefitted from donated laptops include: Voluntary Action Swindon, Threshold Housing, Swindon Neuro Wellbeing Centre, and Wiltshire Wildlife Trust.
