[Sussex] New Ubuntu (11.04) older PC (about 5 y.o.) and how, to get it sorted - possible further issue.......

[Desmond Armstrong]

This whole business of upgrading and downgrading is, in my experience, 
fraught.

For this reason I am very careful, when installing systems to maintain a 
'/' partition and a '/home' partition.
With such arrangement it does become very easy to simply reinstall the 
system while leaving the '/home' partition with the data undisturbed. It 
also allows for easy copying of any user data.

The way forward will be to save any data, this you can do using puppy, 
and simply do clean install.

For what it is worth, this would be my method.

As for desktop, I do prefer gnome and while Unity does have some nice 
aspects I am not particularly enthralled.