Dell Optiplex On the side of the road

["markw-4" <user=5@nabble.blu.org>]

 If you are not interested in reading a Microsoft rant, skip this message. 

OK, I'm driving down the road, and you know how people leave things on the 
sidewalks that they no longer want, hoping that people will take them? 
Well, most of us are probably scroungers I suspect, so you'll understand 
that I was a little curious about a fairly new looking machine out on the 
side of the road. 

I couldn't resist. 

I picked it up, I took a look at it, it looked fine, had 512M RAM, hard 
disk, Intel P4. OK, what's the problem? 

I took it home, hooked it up to a power, monitor, and keyboard and tried 
to boot it. 

Windows XP was SLOW SLOW SLOW, the thing was unusable. It was so loaded 
with stuff, it took 5 minutes to get to the point where you could actually 
do something, albeit slowly. 

Well, I have no interest in XP anyway, but it passed the smoke test, and 
seemed to work. I installed Kubuntu on it, and it is a good solid usable 
machine. Plays DVDs with no skips, it works fine. 

OK, maybe it was old and the person discarding it just wanted a new and 
faster computer, but I can't help but think that this is yet another 
ancillary cost of Microsoft Windows. It costs you up front to get it, it 
costs you regularly in lost productivity, and it costs you at the end 
because a perfectly fine system becomes unusable and prematurely obsolete. 

Beyond the cost to the consumer, obsolete computers are a trash/recycling 
nightmare. 

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