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Old computers; an Alienware laptop, a Dell tower, and an ancient Gateway, between the three it should be a simple matter to throw together a working system for the kids. Not so simple. The laptop was a great solution... for about two days, then it overheated. We're probably lucky that it didn't catch on fire.

The Dell tower was clean, quiet, had a gig of RAM, and a 60 gig hard drive. It took the install but would not reboot after installation. It seemed quite hopeless at that point but I continued anyway. I still had the old Gateway to experiment with.

The Gateway had been retired due to an excessively noisy power supply fan. Well, I stuck in the hard drive and the optical drive and fired it up. It sounded like a Jet Engine! But it took the install and rebooted fine. So I powered her down, unplugged the cords and swapped out the power supplies too.

The hard drive is formated now to the new ext4 file system and has a single boot install of Kubuntu Karmic Koala. It's fast and lean and the kids love it.

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