My classroom computer station is growing. With the addition of another desktop PC, we’ve got three functioning desktops in the back of the room and one in the front of the room (typically used for projecting things).

The newest computer is a donation from a friend of mine. I was helping him clean out the house, and he had an old computer collecting dust. He had no further need for it (he’s got a much newer one), so I suggested that I could bring it into school and put it to good use.

The new computer is from circa 2000. It’s a Pentium III Processor, 800 mhz, with 256mb of RAM. There’s also a fancy graphics card, since he used to use it as a gaming computer. Funny how pathetic those old gaming computers seem now…

Like the Dell I found at school, it wouldn’t boot up. Blue screen of death.

No problem! I booted up a Xubuntu install CD, and it was up and running in an hour or two. I fished some more parts out of a closet at school (we have an abundance of unused mice, keyboards, and CRT monitors) and set it up this morning.

It’s not as speedy as the Dell, but it’s certainly useable for research. It runs Mozilla Firefox fine. Students can surf the web better than they could on the old Macs that used Internet Explorer 5.5… *shudder*

The only thing I’m concerned about is whether or not it will run OpenOffice well. It Xubuntu comes pre-installed with a basic word processor (AbiWord), but Openoffice Writer is much better. It needs a minimum of 256mb of RAM, so I’m unsure how well it’ll work. I’ll install it tomorrow and see.