So my wife has a 10 year old low end notbook. 500Gb of storage (HDD), 2GB of GDR3 RAM, and an intel Celeron Processor N2806. It originally came with Win 8, then she “upgraded” to win 10 and after that it was pretty much unusable. I am talking CPU and Ram about 80-90% in idle, opening a browser got everything down to a crawl. She mostly used it a storage and brwosing, watching youtube and occasionally to write. So I (also a Linux newbie) finally got the time to install a newbie friendly Os (Fedora) and it’s so much better! I am Talking 20%CPU usage and 50%(?) RAM in idle.
It’s crazy how, when you think in terms of modern windows requirements, a dual core, 1.6Ghz, 4.5W cpu sounds like a rock. But if you showed that to someone in the early 2000s running XP with a single core 500Mhz, they would expect it to be blazing fast. Linux gives you the ability to have that performance, along with modern security and functionality, even if windows won’t 👍.
If you have a little cash to spare, I’d recommend upgrading this thing a little bit.
A 480GB SATA 2.5" SSD costs around €22.
8GB of DDR3 can be had for ~€10.
So with maybe €35 of investment (and probably much less if you buy used stuff from your local flea market app) you could make the laptop much faster and much more usable.
If you don’t actually need ~500GB of storage, a 240GB SSD can be had for ~€12.
That sounds quite intriguing, I’ll shop around and give you an update!
You won’t believe what a difference any kind of SSD makes.
I ordered the parts now, a 8gb ram stick (gddr3) and a 520gb ssd for all in all 34€. The parts should arrive in about 2 weeks. Thank you!
Nice! Good luck! To find out how to open it, just look for a video on Youtube if it turns out more complicated than expected.
Btw, if you already have it open, cleaning the fans/fan grilles and potentially even repasting the CPU is usually pretty easy to do and on older laptops easily doubles your CPU performance.
I’ve looked up a video, took it apart, got it all together again. Tried booting it up, paniced for 2 seconds because it couldn’t detect the hard drive anymore, then realised that I had forgotten to plug the drive back in properly (silly me). Opened it up again, got the lill cable back where it belongs and screwed everything together (again). Works like a charm now.
Nice! Well done! I do know this feeling of panicˆˆ
Have fun with a now totally usable laptop!
Allright, my promised update: My Ram finally arrived and I happily put in the 8gb and… It went all south. Horrible boot time, bad performance the whole 9yards. Bios (thank you HP) didn’t even let me change the clockspeed of my ram. Anyways since I wanted to give my Wifes Laptop (her active one) an upgrade anyway I got the 8gb ram in her machine and that one works like a charm (-windows). So I had 4 gb left now (from her machine). Well, I stuck that one in this linux machine and they now play nicely.
So all in all a great success story! Thank you for encouraging me to upgrade it!
Highly recommend installing windows 10 LTSC on it. It’s windows 10, but not fucking awful.
Edit: never mind, I see you already have Ubuntu on it. Good job.
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Lububtu is another lightweight distro for old devices. I’ve used it before on very old devices and it’s great!
Just install xfce Or mate de with ubantu Or mint or any other distro except arch
Why not arch?
Can break very easily always update and update break and also not noob friendly
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/WLP_L7Mgz6M
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Try something like Linux Mint with the Xfce edition. Might be able to lower the RAM a bit more.
Or just xfce on Fedora.
Even if they run only a window manager 2gb of RAM is just not enough for web nowadays.
Recently resurrected a 10-ish year old Lenovo Chromebook-like with an atom CPU and 4gb RAM, running nothing but qtile as a DE and it’s struggling with more than 5 tabs open.
Upgrade the RAM to at least 4gb, preferably 8 and the HDD to SSD.
Also, don’t bother with “lightweight” browsers, in my experience Firefox simply runs much faster.
Can confirm: after the 6th tab while shopping for upgrades everything went to slow motion.
Those Atom processors don’t have the power to be much more than an in-car navigation system with MP3 playback. Forget actual web surfing. You’re actually better off with a RasPi imho.
You can sqeeze plenty of use from these laptops, especially the really light ones.
My gf works as an arts teacher in a primary school and needed something very small and light that she could carry every day to school.
The usage is mostly very light browsing (the school system, some Pinterest), showing the kids some reference images and the ocasional document editing and printing.
For a piece if what essentially is e-waste it handles that admirably, and because of the atom processor it sips power, which still gives it a few hours of battery life after about 10 yeas of ownership.
Tldr: Don’t underestimate how useful an old laptop running a minimal linux disto can be for a casual user.
Dammit, I came in here because I was hoping there was something I could do with my old paperweight. I keep it around cuz it’s cute lol
You can do plenty with any old paperweight. The difficult part is thinking if what you need it to do and if that thing is worth the higher electricity usage of older tech.
I quite like Ubuntu budgie edition.
