didds wrote:Its not unusual however to find its not possible to put windows on such a refurbed system, usually cos I can;t put a licensed and authenticated version of windows on it. The obvious choice wold be to stick something like Mint on it which will be fine for basic browsing and email, homework etc, But my fear is that should I provide such a system it just won;t get used as its "not windows" and will just end up gathering dust, thrown in a skip, or actually sold
I'm not at all sure that this is still necessarily the case - though I accept (as someone who resisted for a long time the rising tide of PC-DOS and MS_DOS on home computers) that it probably has been.
I nowadays see so many people (of various ages) who use an iThing or an Android device and may not even have knowingly used an MS Windows machine. They neither know nor care about the system that supports the things they do - they just want to do stuff and it just needs to work! Kids who are now leaving school with training in a specific office suite (and even a specific version of that suite) may remain fixed on that suite/version for a while but they seem to get over that pretty quickly in their desire to do stuff once they don't have to stick with it for school purposes.
Perhaps it's a partial shift towards working with data rather than working with application programs. I might want access to specific data and don't give a fig whether that's via a word-processor or spreadsheet or presentation package or web browser (and certainly don't care even one hoot what that's called or who publishes it). Creating information and other content for use by others is likely to be different but simply consuming data seems to be becoming increasingly mode-agnostic.
Cheers!