The Illinois Credit Union League is donating 35 computers-replaced as part of an internal upgrade-to member credit unions with assets of $10 million or less.
Each comes complete with "considerable life,'' a 17-inch monitor, keyboard, mouse, CD-ROM and floppy disk drives, Windows 98 and a network card.
"We've just been doing some periodic upgrades of our desktops, and as we are adding more and more programs, we need new computers that will allow us to open six or seven at once,'' said Tom Kane, VP of information technology at ICUL.
Kane said some of the older models were simply tossed, but 35 "still had a lot of useful life in them. We went through and checked all the capabilities, then created a spread sheet of what we had.''
He said the league's member services group then sent faxes to alert its 185 qualifying credit unions of their availability. "I couldn't believe it,'' Kane said of the response. "Within three hours after the faxes went out, I had 14 voice mail messages.''
To date, 22 credits unions have dibs on 25 of the units. Several of the takers said the generous donation saved them the hassle of having to wait for a future budget cycle to purchase a new computer, while others said it would serve to back-up to their main systems.
"And, in some cases, we were told that the computers we offered had better capabilities than the systems they were using,'' he said. "We were just happy to give our member credit unions something they could really use.''
