"People don't have the kind of money to spend buying a new system when they can repair their old stuff for like half the cost," said Dan Seidl, purchasing manager.
The USB controller on the motherboard of my 6-year old PC is shorting out, so I bought an Ultra PCI card with 6 USB ports. I paid $20 with shipping -- a heck of a lot less than a new computer. Now I can run my Wacom Intuos, external HD, flash driver, printer, Alltel aircard, etc. without my system shutting down.
If Microsoft is smart (yeah, I know, HAHAHAAAAA), they could market Windows 7 to those of us with older PC's who refuse to downgrade to Vista.
No doubt there is a glut of people with my skill set out there but some of the ones I have met do not inspire any confidence in me. It is scary how much people simply do not know.
But...why don't you want a buggy piece of spyware masquerading as an operating system?
I saw an article recently on the Frugal Dad blog about repurposing an old laptop with a defunct battery to use as a netbook. He installed the Linux Ubuntu operating system. Pretty interesting stuff. If all you need is to surf and check email you don’t need a supercharged computer and Linus is perfect for that. It’s fun to play with, too.
Puppy Linux is even slimmer, letting you boot from a thumb drive.