The Complete Church Laptop?The complete church laptop containing everything you need to run your church office and services. From Kevin Mayhew Publishers: £1995 reduced to £1495 (out of stock—presumably built to order).
Sounds good—at a price. So let’s see what you get.
- An unspecified DELL Laptop with dual screen capability (for projector not supplied), sound card (for PA not supplied) and wireless (for WiFi not supplied). It is hard to tell from the picture but it looks like a small wide-screen model. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say it is the 4GB i3 Studio 15 w. 1GB ATI graphics card @ £600
- Windows 7 (version not specified—Home Premium included in above price).
- 15 months McAfee Security (included in above price).
- Microsoft Office (presumably home & student edition as there is no Outlook but that is only a non-commercial licence!—£100)
- Mozilla calendar & email (free).
- iTunes (free).
- Spotify (but no subscription).
- 12 Months 2GB cloud backup (not sure about DataSafe but can be free from some places like Mozy).
- 2200 hymns and songs in MP3 and PowerPoint format, presumably with a perpetual licence to play and show them (they are publishers after all). No mention of an update service.
- Some service-sheet templates.
- Software pre-installed and configured.
So £700 worth of stuff plus installation and some data content. It doesn’t look good value to me unless that perpetual license is very expensive. They don’t mention that if you obtain any other songs then you may need CCL, PPL and/or PRS licences to show and play them.
Webmaster
Thank you for your interest in The Complete Church laptop.
We are delighted that you feel it is a good idea, and we wish to add to the above.
The Kevin Mayhew products and software included on the laptop come to around £2,800, the backing tracks alone have a value of £2,200 if bought separately via our CD box sets. You also have the lyrics and all the software on top of this. Although we appreciate that the price may seem expensive, we think that when considering the amount and quality of product installed on the laptop, it is good value for money. We are really proud of our new venture and hope that it will become an invaluable resource for churches all over the country.
Thanks for bringing that to my attention. My experience is largely with words display and I had neglected to note how much value existed in the accompaniments provided. When compared to a device such as Hymnal Plus which is rather less versatile (convenience is arguable) I can see that the system becomes much better value for money.
I would like to have seen a more detailed specification of the system (hardware, software, content and licences) but I suppose that anyone seriously considering it would make enquiries to KMP.
I think few churches, especially smaller ones, use more than a couple of hymn books with a few extra songs in a custom service book so perhaps “customisable” rather than “complete” may be more useful. I was looking at our own projector database the other day and it contains 4000+ songs, but in practice we only use two books (say 1000) plus a handful introduced by the music group. Churches really are very conservative.