>Have you thought of offering such a service for those of us who are not so ... hardwarily skilled? :)

This DIY approach is purely as a hobby where you practice your electronics and software skills while restoring laptops. You have to right-off your labour, travel, power and other miscellaneous costs. You can't make a livable wage out of doing this, unless you've worked out a way of living on less than $1 an hour in NZ. Hamilton has had a few companies try and make a business model out of restoring and selling second hand laptop's and they seem to fail, or they survive by having other product sales, like mobile phones, or by also running the laundry-mat in the shop next door.

> You can guess the reason for this: all the software they know is Windows-based.

If the idea of a "computer lab" at a secondary school is to teach what is currently in the Digital Technologies NCEA curriculum, then from my review of the curriculum all operating system and application software can be free open source. ...but as you state, if all they know is Windows-based applications, then they won't be aware of this.

The current "computer lab" mentality, is along the lines of raised floor tiles, the hum of CPU fans, air-conditioning units blasting away, looms of ethernet wires, with Intel and Windows and proprietary applications.  
 
My drafted proposal of a computer lab is normal rooms, no air-con, ARM and Raspbian technology with open source applications.

In the future a "computer lab" will just be a room with a few chairs. The students turn up and pull out their mobile phones. All the IT applications that they need to learn to pass the NCEA Digital Technologies subjects, will be able to be done on their phone. Their homework will be sent to the teachers instagram account. They'll complete three years of NCEA IT studies and not ever know what operating system their phone uses. ...and I'd say this is only a couple of years away!


> Surely they would be using a lot of web-based stuff by now? In which case, the OS running on the client machine should matter less.

Yep. All you'll need is a web-browser on your mobile phone. You'll be able to enroll to learn about IT at the "School-of-never-typing-anything-at-the-command-line-prompt".

A few years from now and Computer Science graduates won't have seen a console terminal window let alone typed a command on one. Imagine the complexity of getting a computer science student to understand why they would type "ls -l" at a "$" prompt and then the effort required in trying to make sense of the text that comes back at them on the screen. What's this "drwxrwxr-x" crap? They'll have a lot better things to do than try and understand this archaic cryptic console terminal rubbish. This will only be taught to history students that want to graduate and become a museum custodian that houses historical computer technology.


...well I think I'll stop before I go too far off topic I was supposed to be talking about the merits of ARM/Raspbian based computer labs. Let me know if you've got any ideas. I think it would be fun to build one, so maybe there's a school out there that needs one.

cheers,
Ian.