Acer offers up Olympic laptops to London primary schools

Acer offers up free laptops to London primary schools
Acer's Olympic PC infrastructure at work

Acer has made good on its commitment to bring computing goodness to the education sector, revealing a list of primary schools it is sending free laptops to.

The initiative is part of the company's legacy programme for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The company is currently the brains behind the PC hardware infrastructure for the London 2012 Olympic Games and part of this commitment is to offer up some sort of computing legacy in London.

The fruits of this can be seen in Acer's link-up with charity group the e-Learning Foundation, which sees the company offering 500 laptops to select primary schools in the Capital.

These laptops will have been previously used at this year's Olympics, but we're sure they will be in good nick by the time they reach the schools.

Speaking about the initiative, Valerie Thompson, Chief Executive of the e-Learning Foundation, said: "This is a really exciting opportunity for these schools to be part of the London 2012 legacy.

"It would have been easy just to give these [laptops] away, but by requiring that the school makes a commitment to continuing an e-learning programme, we are building the foundations of a sustainable programme rather than a one-off hand-out."

School's out

The schools that have been given a laptop are as follows:

Trinity and Southwood Primary Schools in Dagenham Essex
Cherry Orchard School in Charlton
Whitehall Primary School in London, E4
Northwold Primary School, London E5
Ainslee Wood Primary School in Chingford
Bigland Green Primary School in E1
Brook Community Primary School in E18
The Children's Hospital School, Great Ormond Street Hospital

When it comes to the Olympics, Acer has revealed just what its computing infrastructure entails. According to the company, 13,500 desktops, 2,900 notebooks, 950 servers and storage systems and a number of tablet PCs have been installed at the Games to run the information system for the event.

And there was us thinking it was just one person and an iPlayer connection.

Marc Chacksfield

Marc Chacksfield is the Editor In Chief, Shortlist.com at DC Thomson. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.