The Mercyhurst Child Learning Center relies on an old PC (HP P2-1334) for a few tasks around the office that require minimal processing power. They were planning on replacing the PC, but asked if we could try to speed it up the decade old computer before they resorted to buying a new machine. I was planning on removing some unnecessary programs, but it took several minutes to even open the file explorer.
In order to try to improve the speed, we loaded an Ubuntu operating system, and wiped everything off of the machine on instillation. Because of restrictions on the school computers, I downloaded UNetBootIn at home and loaded the Ubuntu .iso on a USB before school. Students then started the old computer in bootloader mode, where they were given the option to recover from a USB. They selected that, then followed the prompts on screen to initialize the new operating system and wipe the old system. Students were able to follow this process independently, but did ask for permission one last time before wiping everything from the old computer.
After we loaded the operating system, the students took the case off of the computer, and used an air blower to clean the dust out. There was a LOT of dust.
It it running a lot faster but it will probably need replaced if anyone needed to use it for any lengthy tasks as it is still slow, just not painfully slow. To turn the computer on and launch the web browser, it takes about 2 or 3 minutes rather than the 20 or 30 minutes (according to one teacher) that it took before.
My students had a lot of fun working on the computer. I think that doing something that helps real people makes the project much more fun and meaningful. We also had some nice conversations about why you might try to maintain a computer “so old!” when you could just replace it with some brand new more powerful machine. It is funny to think that when this computer was originally purchased, some of them would have been young enough to attend the MCLC preschool.