Ressurecting Old Hardware

[theblueplll]

My daughter never had her own machine not because I couldn't get her one but because she was always on her handheld devices and it never came up.
Recently I noticed she was using her mothers more and more when it wasn't being used so I had a thought.

"Do you want this older laptop I have?" I asked her and she got all excited.

So I needed to get a new power brick for it because it didn't have one and the plug on the machine itself was different than any spare on I had laying around (this is the reason it was given to me since the owner didn't need it anyway yet they gave me the better one out of the 2 they had actually).
And it only had 1.5gb of ram.

Shitty windows vista was on it and there is not much of a chance of it running windows 10 or 7 all that well with that little ram in my opinion.

Come to find out it has a 64bit cpu and could take up to 4gb of ddr2.

So in the end I spent less than $100 on ram and the power brick installed Debian on it, spent a few days making sure it all worked well and customized the UI for her so it looked all girly.

Now she acts like I bought her a brand new machine and is in love with it.

If not for Debian(actually Linux in general) being open source and free she would have ended up with a 15 year old OS that worked like crap even when it was new with no support or security updates.

Made me love Linux and Debian specifically even more and made my kid smile what more could I ask for?


[edited for spelling mistakes]

[phenest]

It doesn't always work. I have an old NEC Spirit 550 (in my sig), that has a Pentium 4 CPU with an nVidia GPU and an SiS chipset and is approx. 14 years old and was designed for Windows XP. The newest version of Linux that works (or that I have and tested) is Debian Squeeze or Ubuntu Hardy Heron, so a distro about the age of the computer. Any new or newish Linux distro than that, and it fails to start. A kernel panic I think, I'm not sure.

But it will quite happily run Windows 10.

Bit of a shame really.

[eor2004]

It doesn't always work. I have an old NEC Spirit 550 (in my sig), that has a Pentium 4 CPU with an nVidia GPU and an SiS chipset and is approx. 14 years old and was designed for Windows XP. The newest version of Linux that works (or that I have and tested) is Debian Squeeze or Ubuntu Hardy Heron, so a distro about the age of the computer. Any new or newish Linux distro than that, and it fails to start. A kernel panic I think, I'm not sure.

But it will quite happily run Windows 10.

Bit of a shame really.

Maybe you can try installing one of these: AntiX, MX Linux, Slitaz or Puppy Linux.

[Deb-fan]

Nice work Thebluepill.

[phenest]

Maybe you can try installing one of these: AntiX, MX Linux, Slitaz or Puppy Linux.

Not that I'm dismissing your idea, but I'm not sure the distro's I tried are the issue. I think it's possibly a kernel/driver issue which may be a part of any distro. Trouble is, I don't want to work on it too much as it has older IDE HDD's which happen to be in perfect condition and not something I want to wear out with too much testing. But that doesn't rule out live CD's.

[theblueplll]

It doesn't always work. I have an old NEC Spirit 550 (in my sig), that has a Pentium 4 CPU with an nVidia GPU and an SiS chipset and is approx. 14 years old and was designed for Windows XP. The newest version of Linux that works (or that I have and tested) is Debian Squeeze or Ubuntu Hardy Heron, so a distro about the age of the computer. Any new or newish Linux distro than that, and it fails to start. A kernel panic I think, I'm not sure.

But it will quite happily run Windows 10.

Bit of a shame really.

Sorry it doesn't work out for you.
EWWW WINBLOWS.

Regardless my daughter is very satisfied and we aren't having any trouble with the machine itself or the OS.

[pcalvert]

I have an old NEC Spirit 550 (in my sig), that has a Pentium 4 CPU with an nVidia GPU and an SiS chipset and is approx. 14 years old and was designed for Windows XP. The newest version of Linux that works (or that I have and tested) is Debian Squeeze or Ubuntu Hardy Heron, so a distro about the age of the computer. Any new or newish Linux distro than that, and it fails to start.

It might be worth trying FreeBSD and/or OpenBSD.

Phil

[Tekmon_Xonic]

@ Original Post

This is the exact reason why I adopted Debian. I've got an old laptop and an old netbook setup as weather stations, of which are both running Debian 9. Both of them used to run Windows XP, but I was able to revive them with Debian. I'm glad that you where able to do the same thing with your Daughter's old laptop. It's amazing to see what you can do with a simple operating system replacement.

[theblueplll]

Nice work Thebluepill.

Thnak you

@ Original Post

This is the exact reason why I adopted Debian. I've got an old laptop and an old netbook setup as weather stations, of which are both running Debian 9. Both of them used to run Windows XP, but I was able to revive them with Debian. I'm glad that you where able to do the same thing with your Daughter's old laptop. It's amazing to see what you can do with a simple operating system replacement.

Yes it is very cool that I was able to do all that so cheap and she is as happy as a kid with a brand new machine.

All she does is social media youtube and web browsing so it wouldn't make sense for me to go spend 3x as much on something brand new really.
And i won't have spyware version 10 in my house snooping on my network.

Besides it pisses her grandmother off that I have her using Linux.
"That's too hard for her to use".
BS Just because you won't listen that it is just as easy as windows for basic tasks doesn't mean otehr poeple can't grasp it.

Recently I even revived and old 32bit 686 machine that I had kicking around.
Havne't done anything with it yet but it is certainly going to be good enough for the project I have in mind.