Not shopping

Yesterday I had a look at my sister-in-laws laptop. It's running 100% CPU all the time, and is not responsive and generally runs like a poorly dog. It's old, was under specified when new, has been upgraded to Windows 10 (which it isn't really up to) and she is on the end of yoghurt pots & string for networking. She is struggling to get her vet's assistant training done, so my mother-in-law offered to buy her a new one, so we nipped over to Carrefour (the only shop open today) to see what they had in stock. The blip is of a display model HP laptop, it's not perfect, but it would be faster than what she has now... However they have it on display, but no staff trained to sell anything from the IT department, so we couldn't buy it.

Instead I copied everything from my mother-in-law's to my sister-in-law's laptops (and vice a versa), installed printer/scanner drivers and they have temporarily swapped laptops. Now my mother-in-law complains that her computer is too slow, but she has much faster Internet, and isn't using her computer as much at the moment, so it's a workable compromise.

When my sister-in-law has finished her course, I'll swap things back, but upgrade the RAM, swap the HDD for a SDD and upgrade her from Windows to Linux, which should make her old computer usable again, and avoid it going to landfill. My wife showed her sister, our laptop running Linux, and she was happy with that - which given her modest uses should be absolutely fine - she only needs LibreOffice, a web browser (Firefox or Chrome) and the ability to scan and print.

When I checked the laptop I had with me, was actually 2 years older than my sister-in-law's laptop, but was higher spec to start with, and has benefitted from a new battery, RAM upgrade, conversion from HDD to SDD and has been running Linux for several years already.... It is considerably faster and far more useful than her poor little laptop!