Switched my grandparents to Ubuntu from windows
So my grandparents have had this 10-year-old AIO PC since day one, running Windows the whole time. They only really use it for email and a bit of web browsing, nothing fancy. But for the last few months it's been absolutely terrible, taking 30+ minutes just to open an app, load a webpage, sometimes even booting up took over an hour.
I dug into it and found:
- HDD (250GB) had 15 partitions, 14 empty
- all the Windows 11 bloatware stuff
- both Norton and McAfee installed
- fucking Bonzi Buddy
- hundreds of copies of edge shortcut in desktop folder and so much more.
I decided that it wasn't worth going through and fixing everything one by one when they barely use it for anything and don't really have any data to backup, so I wiped it and did a clean Windows 10 install (they hated everything about Windows 11 and wanted to go back).
Still took around 10-15 min to boot and open anything, but it was still an improvement over what they had before.
A few days later, my grandparents came over to my house, saw one of my old laptops running Ubuntu, and thought it looked really nice. They asked me a few questions about it, I told them it was a Windows alternative and showed them my main PC running Fedora, they seemed really interested and asked if they could try Ubuntu on their computer. I went over and installed it, and it booted up so much faster. They absolutely love it now. Not only does it look way better than Windows to them, but the performance difference is night and day. It runs so much faster than Windows ever did. Pretty happy with how it turned out honestly.
It still runs pretty slow compared to a modern PC due to the 10 year old HDD, but it's gone from 30+ min load times to 5 min.
Turns out, because they'd seen all the popups for switching to windows 11, they'd hired a guy to come and update it. He'd added all those partitions (presumably during install), added McAfee, and charged $450 for it all. I fixed it for free by wiping it and installing Ubuntu.