[ale] Donated computers

[aledonne.listmail at gmail.com (Alex LeDonne)]

On 11/16/06, Christopher Fowler <cfowler at outpostsentinel.com> wrote:
> My kids' daycare was donated about 8+ computers.  Apparently my wife
> volunteered me to take a look.  Today I looked.  It appears all of these
> machines are Dell Dimension XPS D333 computers.  The have all the normal
> features but are PII-333 adn 128m of memory.  Where it counts they seem
> to be lacking.  IMO these computers would make nice boat anchors since
> they are heavy and can grab mud easily.
>
> My thought is that these computers feel like circa 1998 machines.  I
> could treat them as such.  They could load Win98 on them and then find
> educational software from around that time that is compatible and run
> that.  As long as the machine is good they will be in good shape.
>
> I wanted to try the educational version of Ubuntu but that would just
> require too much memory and CPU.  Even trying to find and get memory for
> these systems would be a pain.
>
> I wish that when people would donate computers they would at least try
> to donate something they would find worthy for them self.  Don't donate
> the stuff you consider trash.  I know there is a parable that talks
> about this.....
>

Those sound like excellent LTSP terminals. See
http://k12ltsp.org/contents.html for the LTSP subproject specifically
for K-12 schools and the like.

-A