we decided we needed new computers. The ones we had were old, probably seven or eight years old at a guess, running Windows 2000 on 10 GB hard drives, 128 MB RAM and chunky 15" CRT monitors. As standalone machines with this setup and no internet, they worked fine. But people want and need to use the internet nowadays and once I'd installed firewall, anti-virus and anti-spyware they soon crawled to a halt. Maybe I went overboard with the free software, but they were basically unusable.
We found a volunteer to help us network them all and invested in Windows 2003 Server through to do it. Everyone had there own login and file space. What I hadn't realised until this point was that most people using the computers found it difficult to remember their username and password from one week to the next. They just wanted to get online and browse, but by the time they had logged in with a new password set up by me as the system administrator they had lost the will to continue. And even if they did carry on, their experience was still poor due to general slowness and regular crashing of the machine or network connection.I tried loading Ubuntu on to these machines, or rather Xubuntu, which worked OK. At least everything was a bit quicker and we didn't have to worry too much about firewalls, etc. I set them up so that by default they booted up into a "guest" login automatically so that people didn't have to remeber passwords. But even with Xubuntu, the experience wasn't great. The screens were still small and took up too much desk space. Some people wanted or preferred Windows XP or Vista or a Mac, I prefer Ubuntu. Ideally we would have a flexible system where people could learn and use different OSs on big screens, but with simple, quick and secure access to a kiosk-style screen for those who just wanted to browse the web
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