[atum47]

Being a poor student in Brasil, I went through my first two years of college using a R$ 400,00 (around 80 dollars) Dell notebook. Several of my projects hosted on GitHub were written using this machine.

There's a super market chain here (Carrefour) that sells eletronics. They usually would hold a sales when something is wrong (a product is about to expire or an electronic presents mal functioning). My notebook in question fell into this category, it presents a small defect. The defect?! The Windows pre installed in the machine wouldn't activate online (some problem with the key).

So I got the notebook extra cheap, activated it by phone (since I could not activate it by software), saved the key, remove windows, installed linux (which doubled the speed of the machine, of course) and went my merry way into college.

I don't know the rest of the world, but a smartphone in Brazil can be compared in price to a notebook (a not very good one). The second advice from this story is Linux can give new life to old machines, try it.

[grogenaut]

I've added 5+ years of life to several of my old laptops with Linux. Spouse was hesitant to try it on their dying windows machine but with Linux it was very usable and absurdly faster. It's actually still usable and it's a 2006 dell.

It's almost time to move their win7 machine to ubuntu