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.
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.
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.
When using an SSD, install the OS with ZRAM instead of swap. This will increase the SSD’s life.
This Is The Way
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.
Lububtu is another lightweight distro for old devices. I’ve used it before on very old devices and it’s great!
Lubuntu, kubuntu, xubuntu…I’ve gone from Lu to Xu, but I think I’ll end up with ku because PipeWire and wayland and flatpak (I get the impression that they’re the way forward for the next while…). They’ll make pretty much anything work better than whatever windows version retired them.
Kubuntu has been the best Ubuntu for a while, the mainline keeps going further and further down the bad way.
Still, debian is good too.
I used Lubuntu before, but I since switched to Xubuntu. About the same performance but much better usability.
Thats the system overwatch:
Try something like Linux Mint with the Xfce edition. Might be able to lower the RAM a bit more.
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.
It can be cute and still functional in a limited way…
Or just xfce on Fedora.
I quite like Ubuntu budgie edition.
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Turn it into a plex media server.
I’ve always wanted to run a media server (Jellyfin, not Plex), but thought you need something more capable to have a good experience. Am I wrong?
Nah, I use to run plex on a crap laptop. Only thing it couldn’t do, was handle x265
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 👍.
I also got an old notebook, atom N260 32 bits, 3GB of RAM. I put a 128GB SSD, then I installed MX Linux with Xfce (MX21.3_386) and it’s usable for light tasks. Yes browsing heavy sites is slow, but everything else works pretty well.
The first thing is to get a total of 4 GB ram (looks like the max for this cpu) into it and an ssd. These are both very cheap atm. See if there’s a video available for your particular model on the internet about getting into the case for the upgrade. Install a lightweight Linux distro. I have a similar 11 year old laptop and it’s working nicely for browsing/video play etc. with Zorin Lite. Good luck!
I’m glad you succeeded at installing something lighter to replace Windows.
Have you search for buying more SODIMM RAM? Buying a 4 gig kit will allow for more room for things to run, and a 8 gig kit would allow the processor to run at full speed, assuming the graphics is also using up dedicated RAM space.
I’ve used Fedora Plasma and it never came close to using 8GB when using multiple problems, it can go a little over 4GB used. Even though it’s a Celeron, the 8GB would allow everything to run freely at full capacity and use more of the processor instead of the processor wsiting on RAM and potentially swaping to the drive.
You can also look at GhostBSD if you want a default GUI desktop but want to try what FreeBSD can do.
I have ordered a 500gb SSD and 8gb of ram (gddr3) All in a a pretty cheap upgrade.
The SSD will make for a very big difference in loading and operation speed, plus filling out the RAM, everything is going to run so much nicer. If the socket can recognize all 8GB, it will be a nicer experience.
I would suggest you have a look sometime at Devuan for consistant stability, light on system resources, and if you using the testing branch you’ll never have to install new releases, you only have to do an update.
You did good opting for a Linux distribution, but Gnome (Fedora’s desktop environment) is still pretty heavy: they recommend 4GB ram at least.
I would suggest a more lightweight desktop environment like LXQt. The best distributions that ship it are:- Fedora LXQt edition: if you’re already used to Fedora commands and
dnfpackage manager - Lubuntu: probably the most user friendly for beginners
- SparkyLinux: for users that are a little more advanced but that has the lightest and most rock solid base (Debian)
- Fedora LXQt edition: if you’re already used to Fedora commands and
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Thats a very creative way of using old Laptop parts where I would probably not manage to pull one of them off. I have already ordered 8gb of ram and a 500gb SSD to give it a few more years of life.
A thing you didn’t mention to improve thermals is to take it apart remove the dust from the cooler and maybe change the thermal past, that laptop came with windows 8 (released in 2013) literally 10 years ago.
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I know many people in the self-hosting community re-purpose old laptops as lightweight web servers. If you’re interested in learning Linux, this machine would be a good one to learn on for a lightweight distro.
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
I’ve had more breaking updates in Ubuntu LTS releases than arch based ones. Especially when at some point you always find yourself forced to use PPAs.
To me, being “noob unfriendly” is disabling flatpak to push a (semi) proprietary broken mess.
