"Making a 'business' installing LL on old computers": your comments please ...

[m654321]

Many thanks for all your comments.

[member=6925]Artim[/member]: sorry to hear the ad didn’t work for you: it didn’t work for me either the last time I tried it. This is now second time round, with a few improvements (screenshots, Jerry’s editing). I don’t know whether it will work, but worth another try.  Your comment about people being suspicious of “gimmicks” and “harvesting data for nefarious purposes” is spot on – there are so many scams these days its right to be wary. 

[member=2]Jerry[/member]: ad has now been updated online to your edited version – reads much better

[member=8170]MS[/member]: “people still would rather want something commercial”
I think the well known commercial products are familiar – with Windows you know what to expect –  what I’m offering is unfamiliar to most people, so they shy away from it. You’re right about the gaming – wise not to push that one – best to concentrate on admin tasks

[member=5239]torreydale[/member]: I agree with much of what you say – maybe better to do it for free! The only reason I do it at a ridiculously low price is that it’s a bit of a hobby and would like to get the word about Linux out to the 97% of PC users who don't use Linux

[member=8170]MS[/member]: cheapest laptop – do you include chromebooks? I’ll have a look & get back to you.

[member=7109]Moltke[/member]: some good ideas there about spreading the word.  The ‘electric pole’ idea made me smile – I  imagined a Linux Lite neon sign flashing 24/7 outside our house …

[MS]

Speaking of Chromebooks, in my country the country where I live, they did not succeed, because of uncompetitively low hardware specs offered for inadequately high price. Majority of consumers rather bought regular laptops with Windows 10 on board. Besides, there are no known advantages of Chromebooks over Windows 10 systems, valid to casual users, apart from maybe the Android apps support, which has landed fairly lately, too late to make for an argument, I think.

My guess is that you can have a laptop already for as much as 120 GBP, some very low spec, but a new one, with producer guarantee. I think a lot of people would rather go for the thrill of consumerism, than overinvest in something they already would likely get rid of, even for the aesthetic reasons, times often.

Besides, if they are not very tech savvy, nerdy sounding solutions are not really the way to go, are they?

[m654321]

[member=458]m654321[/member], how much for is the cheapest new laptop one can get in your country, both without any OS preinstalled and with Windows10 coming on board? What are the specs?

Around the £200 mark brand-new with Win10: e.g. RF Dell Lat. E5440 i5 4Gb 120SSD £209.00
Without OS, you can get for some models, but not easy to find - mainly online - not necessarily cheaper. Without OS can be bought from companies that custom-make to order, but they are usually more expensive than mainstream with Win OS pre-installed. 

Yes, the odds may well be against an ad working, a bit like Artim's previous experience, but I think it's worth a try before calling it a day

[Moltke]

[member=7109]Moltke[/member]: some good ideas there about spreading the word.  The ‘electric pole’ idea made me smile – I  imagined a Linux Lite neon sign flashing 24/7 outside our house …

hahaha oh well, that wasn't exactly what I meant but the picture of it made me smile too...  ;D

[MS]

Looking at the offer in a store of choice, I found one interesting model, available without any preinstalled OS, which is Lenovo Ideapad 330-17AST, coming at about 310 GBP, according to the actual currency translation - in your country, there is probably about a 5% margin in the price, but in my country, electronics is not that cheap either. Anyway, the mentioned laptop has a 17.3" screen, FHD native resolution, 4 GB of RAM (2133 MHz), 256 GB SSD drive, AMD A6 processor (2.6 GHz, 3.0 GHz Turbo, 1 MB Cache) and Radeon R4 integrated graphics. USB 2.0 and 3.1, Bluetooth, DVD drive, camera, microphone, stuff. Nice casual consumer piece of tech.

For the current offers I see, it is hard to find anything with more than 4 GB of cheap quality RAM, without going further than roughly 300 GBP.

What is really the point? The point is, if someone wants Linux, they can get it, but it takes to become involved. Majority of machines come with Windows 10 preinstalled and even though it does increase the price a little bit for certain, the difference is not really worth a damn to casual consumers, to have a machine which will not simply work out of the box when shipped already.

Perhaps you could take an angle in your business that would aim at providing support to people buying a computer without any preinstalled operating system, to get them hooked up on Linux.

For the argumentation, be it either financial savings or having a better piece of tech instead for the money.

But honestly, I think sooner or later you would need to answer some questions regarding the infrastructure or rather, the lack of it. It is not worth the risk on your behalf, I think. Not for that money.

In the contemporary Linux, one needs to think for oneself.

[m654321]

[member=458]m654321[/member] [size=1em],[/size]
"Backing up data ...  is not worth the price you're asking." 
"The little money you're asking for this isn't worth the legal pressure if you mistakenly lose their data"

Thanks torreydale, valid point - in response to this I changed the following,
from:
"Before any installation, your existing Windows documents & files will be saved"
to:
"Before any installation, save all your personal data to an external drive"

Also, hopefully by changing this, people wont think I'm running some kind of scam to harvest personal data from PCs ...  ???