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.
I want to second this. 2 GB of ram is simply unusable and I’m honestly surprised Windows 8 ran passably well. A min of 8 GB of ram and a small SSD will give it a new lease on life.
The SSD upgrade is almost critical, and when you install the OS, be sure to include a swap partition (2GB is enough) that functions as a system buffer/parallel & virtual RAM. A bigger RAM chip can’t hurt either. This is exactly what I’ve done for a very similar machine mentioned in another post of this thread.
The SSD upgrade is almost critical, and when you install the OS, be sure to include a swap partition (2GB is enough) that functions as a system buffer/parallel & virtual RAM. A bigger RAM chip can’t hurt either. This is exactly what I’ve done for a very similar machine mentioned in another post of this thread.
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.
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!
Even if they run only a window manager 2gb if 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.
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 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.
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.
Linux can handle NTFS (the module is in the kernel). I have a partition formatted with NTFS made for this purpose (shared games files and data). You have to add a line in fstab with the right parameters though…
It’s a text file that describes which partition and filesystem must be started (mounted) when the system boots. Generally it’s /etc/fstab. It’s a crucial configuration file.
yeah honestly if Linux ever goes mainstream it will probably be some monkeys paw bullshit where some corpo makes a non-Foss data hungry distro or something and it’s barely batter than windows or osx
Faceit oof, need full access to your pc, refuse to let you use features of your pc and you have to strangle them during a gdpr request to make them finally hand over data. Shame how they fell, but they have that market share advantage.
I think that’s a fundamental problem: A tool like faceit takes freedom from the user away. If it was open source (i.e. modifiable), it could lie in favour of its owner. Since Linux is open source, a good programmer could probably get Linux to lie to the tool to send the wrong data and therefore allow cheating. Controlling the user requires a system the user has no control over :-)
Server browser would help mitigate the issue. Let you user police themselves. They build a community and police themselves from harmful actors if they want to have fun with their friends.
I somewhat recently ran across VanillaOS, which I have only really had time to install and play around with for a few minutes, but it seems really cool. A very brief overview is that it is a sort-of-but-not-really immutable OS that leans very heavily on containerization to allow you to install packages from any other distro in a seamless-to-the-user way. So you can install an application (cli or GUI) from an ubuntu repo and use it along side an application from an arch repo. It's ubuntu-based, but according to the info on that link, the next release switches to being debian-based.
I mostly use ChromeOS these days-- well, I guess technically I mostly use SteamOS these days-- so I don't have a lot of hands-on experience with VanillaOS, but I found the concept really cool and from a few minutes of playing around with it, it seemed to work pretty well with respect to the containerization stuff.
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!
"I use Linux as my operating system," I state proudly to the unkempt, bearded man. He swivels around in his desk chair with a devilish gleam in his eyes, ready to mansplain with extreme precision. "Actually", he says with a grin, "Linux is just the kernel. You use GNU+Linux!' I don't miss a beat and reply with a smirk, "I use Alpine, a distro that doesn't include the GNU Coreutils, or any other GNU code. It's Linux, but it's not GNU+Linux."
The smile quickly drops from the man's face. His body begins convulsing and he foams at the mouth and drops to the floor with a sickly thud. As he writhes around he screams "I-IT WAS COMPILED WITH GCC! THAT MEANS IT'S STILL GNU!" Coolly, I reply "If windows were compiled with GCC, would that make it GNU?" I interrupt his response with "-and work is being made on the kernel to make it more compiler-agnostic. Even if you were correct, you won't be for long."
With a sickly wheeze, the last of the man's life is ejected from his body. He lies on the floor, cold and limp. I've womansplained him to death.
Alpine uses musl libc + busybox as GNU replacements. They have less code base and they are more lighweight. GNU code is really old and some power users say the code is bloated and poorly maintained.
Oh ho ho this is getting interesting. What a big fat L for RedHat. Choked CentOS and lost control of the community, cut off source access and spurred migration away from their platform. Now they not only have to contend with Oracle but SUSE too. I wonder if this will culminate in legal proceedings should RedHat try to further restrict source access.
I like your thinking, I have a dual boot on laptop with windows 11 and LMDE installed, and its been a while since I booted to windows for personal use. Unfortunately for me I am still dependant of windows until Autodesk decides they will create the software I use for the linux environment as well. Until then, I’ll rock on with personal “freedom” of linux, while I’m a slave to the corporate / microsoft
I still have a Windows 10 gaming machine that gets fired up occasionally to be honest. Originally it was a VM on my Linux system, but I had some issues with cache latency and anti-cheat, so I’d figured I need a dedicated system. Nowadays I game as much as possible on my Steam Deck, though. But I think in a year or two I will switch that Windows system over to Linux as well. Gaming on Linux has gotten that good.
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