Fountain of Youth for your old PC?

My friend Dave, has an old Dell desktop with 128mg memory and a 800 mHz Pentium 3 processor. The PC was primarily used by his family for playing computer games. His kids had long ago abandoned the PC because it was so slow, and they lacked the patience to wait until it booted before moving onto some other activity!

So there his PC sat, unloved, unused, abandoned.

With nothing left to lose, he asked us to install Linux on it. Our first attempt failed, when we got a cryptic error message before getting to the install screen. Since we were previously successful with a similar processor and 256mg of memory, we speculated that a memory upgrade was required. After a quick trip to Best Buy to retrieve 256mg of additional memory ($49) we were in business.

In less than an hour we had transformed an aged relic into a fully functioning (dare I say speedy?) PC once again. It now boots in a fraction of the time it took with the old Microsoft operating system. His "renewed PC" comes complete with email, IM, an open source office productivity suite, a browser and home networking.

I wonder how many old PCs there are out there, abandoned for all the same reasons.

Is this a "green" business opportunity? Could someone out there build a business around bringing old PCs back to life as Linux machines? I believe the vast majority of home PCs are used for email, IM and browsing the internet.

In my short experience with Ubuntu (Linux), it seems to fit the bill. Before declaring Ubuntu the "Fountain of Youth" for old Microsoft based PCs, I'll check back with Dave in a month or so and report on his Linux experience.

Stay tuned.