[NCLUG] Another good day

[Brian Wood]

David Braley wrote:
> Just wanted to share with the group my short story of converting another
> person to Linux.
> 
> A friend of mine called me on Saturday asking if I could help her with a
> used laptop that she had gotten (she actually got it for free). After
> she arrived, I set it on by bench, booted it up to a horribly infected
> windblows 2000 OS, and watched it struggle to do anything. It would take
> almost 5 minutes to start up the file explorer because of all the "who
> knows what" running in the background.
> 
> So after discovering that she only had a 700 mhz Pentium III processor
> with 256 megs of ram, I started into my Linux sales pitch. After very
> little convincing, she was game and I started to wipe the hard drive
> clean as I continued my spiel about the virtues of Linux on older hardware.
> 
> About 1 hour and 40 minutes later, I had an Xbuntu system up and running
> on the old machine. The laptop came with a wireless card that was
> natively supported and OpenOffice was so easy for her to use, it seemed
> like she had always used it.
> 
> She left with a fully functional laptop. She can surf the web, email her
> friends, use her digital camera, and even work from home on the
> documents she creates on the windows machine at work.
> 
> One down, one billion to go.......
> 
> I had a good day. ;-)

Sounds like you did.

My experience has been that most Windows users have at least one
application that can't easily be made to work with Linux. It might be a
game for their kids, an application from work, some piece of hardware
like a GPS or an OBDII reader, or a smart phone, so you can't easily
replace their main Windows box, a secondary machine like a laptop has a
better chance of being usable, as you discovered.

Most of these things can be made to run under Linux, perhaps under
vmware or the like, but generally not by most Windows Weenies.

Note also that Microsoft now prohibits running Vista under any emulator
unless you have paid for the top-priced product.

beww