A practical case study in extending the life of critical software on existing hardware without costly redevelopment.
Some software just works. It was built carefully, maintained well, and over the years it became so embedded in how an organisation operates that the idea of replacing it stopped being a technology decision and became something closer to an institutional risk.
That’s exactly the situation we found ourselves in when a school came to us with a problem. They were running a specialised industry program — custom built, two decades old, deeply integrated into their curriculum — on ageing Windows 10 machines. Microsoft’s end of support deadline was approaching. The software vendor no longer existed. There was no upgrade path, no modern equivalent, and no budget for a redevelopment that would cost tens of thousands of dollars and take months to deliver.
The school’s IT advisor had told them their only option was to replace the program entirely. We disagreed.
The problem with “just replace it”
When legacy software reaches the end of its supported life, the default advice from the technology industry is almost always the same: start again. Buy a new system. Migrate your data. Retrain your staff. Accept that the institutional knowledge baked into your existing software will be lost in translation.
For large organisations with deep pockets, that advice is inconvenient. For a school running on a tight budget, it’s devastating. The cost isn’t just financial. It’s the curriculum time lost to retraining, the disruption to students mid-program, and the very real possibility that a replacement system never quite does what the original did.
We started from a different premise. The software works. The hardware works. The only thing that doesn’t work is the operating system it’s running on. So let’s fix that.
What we actually did
We installed Ubuntu — a free, open-source Linux operating system — on the existing hardware. Ubuntu is stable, secure, and actively maintained. It runs efficiently on older machines and doesn’t require the hardware specifications that Windows 11 demands.
The legacy program itself was run inside a Windows virtual machine using VirtualBox, also free and open-source. The virtual machine sits inside Ubuntu, completely isolated from the host operating system, and runs exactly as it always has. From the user’s perspective, nothing changed. The program opens, performs exactly as it always did, and saves data in exactly the same format it always has.
The entire migration took less than a day per machine. The school’s staff needed no retraining. The students noticed nothing different. The program that was supposedly at the end of its life is now running on a platform that will continue to receive security updates and support for years to come.
What this actually cost
The software components — Ubuntu, VirtualBox — cost nothing. The hardware was already in place. The time investment was ours, and it was measured in hours rather than months.
Compare that to the alternative: a full redevelopment of a specialised curriculum program, new licensing costs, staff retraining, student disruption, and the inevitable six-month period where the new system doesn’t quite do what the old one did.
The total saving was significant. More importantly, the school kept something irreplaceable — a program that had been refined and improved over twenty years to fit their specific needs perfectly.
The broader lesson
This case study is not unusual. Across Australia, schools and organisations are sitting on perfectly functional software and hardware that they’ve been told is obsolete. In most cases, the obsolescence is not technical. It’s commercial. The vendor moved on. The operating system changed. The support contract expired.
None of that means the software stopped working.
Before you replace something that works, it’s worth asking whether the problem is actually the software — or whether it’s the environment the software is running in. In our experience, it’s almost always the latter. And in most cases, that’s a much cheaper and faster problem to solve than anyone is telling you.
The most sustainable technology decision is the one that keeps working technology in productive use. Sometimes that takes creativity. Sometimes it takes a willingness to look past the default advice. And sometimes it just takes Ubuntu.