A couple days ago, I helped a friend install Ubuntu on an old Dell laptop that was cluttered up with all the stuff that gets on a machine after years of Windows usage. He was so impressed at what a difference it made that I decided to let him explain what happened:

I was preparing for an upcoming business trip for which I needed a functional laptop computer. For the rare times I had a casual need for a laptop recently, I had been using a four year old Dell Inspiron 600m that I inherited from my son. He’d given it to me when it started to behave strangely and he had opted to get a new computer.

When I first got the Dell, I ran Norton System Works and it cleaned up enough errors in the registry and whatever to make the machine usable. However, it remained an “ugly” computer for a variety of reasons:

1. There was a tremendous amount of clutter from data and programs that were no longer in use. This clutter started with the “crapware” that came with the machine, and had been added to over the years. The 30 GB hard drive now had about 3 GB remaining free.

2. Every bootup caused a certain Lego program to start, and I had to click “exit” to make that window go away.

3. Every bootup produced an error message that a certain DLL was missing. My son told me that the DLL belonged to a program he had long ago removed, but something in the system still thought it needed to find that DLL.

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