The Setup

In October 2007, I setup 6 PCs (P4 1.7Ghz, 256-512MB RAM, 40GB HDD, Win2K, no internet) at three rural health facilities in Southern Ethiopia to function as e-libraries. This project was the first of its kind in Ethiopia to focus entirely on front-line health professionals working in resource poor health centres. I had had very little time last year to set them up and all of them except one had default Win2K installations. In one PC at Alaba I had installed a system utility software that limited access to most administrative tasks. All of them had their HDD partitioned into two 20GB partitions with the OS on one and e-library on the other. AVG anti-virus 7.5 and anti-spyware were installed on all of them. Openoffice, VLC and Firefox were some of the other software that were also installed. The IT skills of the users was extremely limited and technical support was non-existent. A year had passed and all I knew was that some of the computers were 'not working' with no further details provided. This could be due to anything from as simple as a broken power socket to a burnt mobo. I simply had to go there to find out.