I had to visit an office yesterday for an appointment and the computers for the customers to use whilst they are waiting were not working, the machine detected an HDD error and would not continue to load the Windows 10 operating system. This is not very good in 2022, is it? The machine in question was a DELL Optiplex 3050. A nice little mini-computer, but crippled running Windows 10. Debian or OpenBSD would be amazing on such a machine. The photograph below shows this machine and the error is displayed. The only way to fix this machine is to purchase a new SSD and install that on the machine. This is what it looks like. Shop link. It would make a cool little server with Debian installed and running various tasks. Probably better than running Windows 10 for sure. Information Technology seems to have gone downhill in recent years, with downsizing and staff shortages due to COVID-19, this is an inevitability, but I wish people would get better computers and networks, most of them are slow and problematic these days. I thought the future would bring better and faster computer networks, but although this is true of some businesses it is not the universal reality.
Maybe in the future, some sense will come back to the world and this will be fixed. It seems like short staffing and laziness are coming back to bite business owners in this current reality, dominated by COVID hysteria and news of the war in Ukraine. But there has to be better technology that could be used instead of the useless Windows 10 operating system that seems very bloated and unusable. Windows 11 is very sleek and has some great features, maybe they could use that. I do wonder if you removed the HDD from the machine and set up the machines as thin clients instead connected to a capable server, would this be better? A thin client would not need the OS installed on the actual machine. Something like this would be adequate. Dell Thin Client Desktop 3050-T50 – Single Core. Website. I think a network of thin client machines are the best alternative and would suit this use case. Better than laggy machines running Windows that get viruses and malfunction easily. For accessing the web and making simple documents you would only need a simpler computer interface and not the whole Windows caboodle.