general help for a school project

[idkwhatimdoing1.0]

Hey guys, I know this is not an Ubuntu specific question but I am working on a project at school because for now my school has around 80-90 desktop computers. But they are out right horrible. They used to be good when running Windows 7 but recently the technician upgraded to Windows 10 Educational but didn't upgrade the hardware. So basically here are the small known things that my school computers have. They have a 250 GB HDD (model is a WD2500AAKX-083CA0) they have 4GB of RAM either DDR2 or DDR3 and an Intel i5 processor (sorry I don't know the exact model but its probably a cheap one as the computer is outright slow). The Windows 10 on it is logged into an admin account that only the technician has access to (and he works one day a week...) and its a 64 bit operating system, which also got me thinking. Would it not be wiser to just have the 32bit Windows installed as really only 4GB of RAM is in those things... So here is my idea/project that I need to bring up to the school board for the future school. Basically you can't download anything extra on the computer cause its always logged into the admin account so without the username and password nobody can install anything. So theirs only 70GB of place taken up for files and etc. And theirs also a deep-freeze so anything you download goes away anyway. So basically I was thinking that the future school should run off a server instead of having every computer have a 250GB HDD yet only using 70GB of it. So question number 1: would it be possible to just buy the necessary equipment but use the hard drives from the desktops now to give the servers the storage? Question number 2: What would be the equipment needed to achieve this goal (whether or not the existing hard drives can't be used). Question #3: By doing this method would it be possible to have students have there own drive? For example I would log in my school account when opening up the computer and whatever I had saved on that account on a different computer would be there as it would be saved onto the server and not have to go through the whole cloud thing) And final question #4: What kind of software would be best and hardware for this to not be too bad yet cost effective? Like if we keep 4GB of RAM should they instally Windows 10 32bit instead or should they add more RAM or sell there 250GB HDD to buy smaller 90GB HDD that are faster? Weird things yes I know but any help is thankful.

[oldfred]

Moved to Cafe, since not specific Ubuntu help.

[TheFu]

64-bit is what I'd want for a huge number of reasons on any computer with 3G or more of RAM. 32-bit Windows doesn't have the same level of security as 64-bit Windows. https://www.howtogeek.com/165535/why-the-64-bit-version-of-windows-is-more-secure/

It is unclear which OS your other questions are about. I can't say anything about Windows. Not my expertise.

Depending on where you are in the world, Linux desktops could be politically impossible. It has been suggested and deployed in a local school system here. About 4 months after the deployment, something failed somewhere and the local administration called some "computer experts", who decided that wiping the authentication server and installing Windows would be a good idea. That broke everything, so rather than call for help from the phone number on the side of the servers, the Linux experts, they decided to wipe all the desktops and install Windows.

Linux was never re-introduced, since clearly it was the entire problem from the start. The "fix" included hundreds of new MSFT licenses and CALs and support contracts and Office software and A/V software, but no new hardware. This was before Google-Docs or other "cloudy" offers that worked for schools.

More and more schools are using Chromebook hardware with school-oriented google services. ChromeOS is tied to the hardware, so it can't be run on former Windows machines.

BTW, a hint for posting questions - split up huge walls of text into paragraphs. Makes it easier to read and more replies are likely if it is easier to read and clear.