Dalhousie is a medium-sized university, with about 15,000 FTE students, located in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It is one of Canada's oldest and most prestigious universities, yet, like many other public institutions, it frequently suffers from a lack of adequate funding to fulfill all the conflicting needs of the various faculties and departments. This article describes the makeover done to the desktop and printing systems at the Dalhousie University Libraries when a one-time funding became available suddenly to implement the Dalhousie Learning Commons (LC), a project long planned but financially out of reach. The Learning Commons is a new facility designed to bring traditional library resources and services and desktop computing resources and services into one central location for student use.