Can Linux save this old laptop from obsolescence? 

Replacing the HDD with an SSD would do far more for performance than the 4GB of ram. That's by far the most important upgrade you can make.

The keyboards on these were amazing. You could type forever on them and they just felt great. A hidden benefit from older, less powerful hardware is since it's slower, you are limited in your multitasking and are basically forced to focus on what you're doing.

I'm beyond thankful for lightweight linux distros because they saved my old 2012 laptop from becoming landfill. I had to move a few years back and I didn't want to rely on my phone all the time for media so I dug up my old inspiron from a decade ago and put in an old cheapo SSD I had lying around. Given that my financial situation collapsed in the 2010s I now can use that laptop as my TV, music player, and even a secondary PC when my friends need tech support. I legit can't imagine life without it and had it not been for enthusiasts' hard work I would've never been able to have the life I have now.

Lots of good lightweight choices out there - Alpine, TinyCore, Slax and many more. It's been fun to watch computing evolve. I started in 1974. Yeah, I'm that old.

My mom absolutely hates it when I try to get these old laptops. She thinks that I have enough of them already. (I have a dell inspiron 1000, an acer nitro 5, and some old broken cromebook) they are super fun to mess with. Especially the inspiron, which was designed to run windows xp. I don't think enough people understand what it means to be a tech enthusiast. It's not all about the high end stuff.

What made this video watchable to the end, for me, was the clear, slower talking, instead of the fast talking on most other channels. This is amazing for an older laptop to just use for linux, maybe an SSD would make it even more useful. Great video

Void Linux is a solid choice. My T420 uses Void Linux and I've never had an issue with it. Ever. Once configured, it just works.

I just bought the X220 for the price of $15. It's in the rough shape but it's still functional and just needed a keyboard replacement. I put whatever SSD and RAM I have at my disposal and with $30 I have a very functional laptop that I can use whenever I need a Windows/Linux machine (I use Mac as my daily driver). These old computers really don't deserve to be on the e-waste, they just need a better software to keep on chugging.

I watched this video and expected to see 500k - 1mil subscribers. Very high quality video and editing. Great job!

I would also like to mention Puppy Linux. It is available as 64 and 32 Bit version and runs fine on almost any old hardware, e.g. on the small netbooks with Intel Atom CPU and 1 or 2 GB of RAM, which are otherwise almost useless today. Use it on my Lenovo Ideapad S10 with a 256GB SSD and it works perfect.

I upgraded a 16 or 17-year-old Dell. I replaced the hard drive with an SSD and upgraded the RAM to 4G. It's running the standard Linux Mint, and it runs quite well. Thanks for the video.

I'm using windows 7 pro for my acer aspire 4920g from 2007 ,,, it still running web browsing very well and also old triple A games like max payne 2 , farcry , also fallout 3 but with way down settings ,, i'm in the third world country,, so electronics doesn't come cheap,, we get by with old electronics 😊

Thanks for doing this. It’s nice to see getting more use of older hardware and keeping it out of landfills.

In 2013 I got an Acer C710 Chrome book. I flashed the bios with seabios. Installed a 500 gigabyte Samsung Evo 960 Sata SSD, 6 gigs of ram. I use Bodhi Linux, with the Moksha desktop environment. Still using it in 2023. ♥️😊

There is something so satisfying about these very simple and casual videos that is just so bingeable!

I have one of these I use fairly frequently, personally im running mint on an ssd. The 4:3 aspect ratio makes it ideal for torrenting old anime and cable shows. It also proved a novel way of experiencing the SM64 PC Port. As you mentioned they work quite well for schoolwork. Glad to see some appreciation for these old machines

I just put Linux on an old 3rd gen CORE Pentium laptop with 8GB. It is doing great at college for the web based stuff he has to do.

The old Thinkpads had several standout features that still, to this day don't seem to have been emulated by other laptop makers: - Indestructible hinge design. Never breaks away from the base of the case. Screen stays in the position you adjust it to. - Pointing stick. I hate touchpads, then because they were garbage and now because I have a hand tremor. - Exterior of the case had a "rubberized" texture which made it easier to hang on to and less prone to skate off a surface to certain damage on impact. - Reasonable keyboard design. My 2cents anyway.

I have a 15+ years old all-in-one pc with approximately the same specs. It uses manjaro kde with no problems. Plasma KDE uses up approx. 700 Mb. My mother used it for work and web browsing for more than 10 years. She even records audio with USB DaC and microphone. That's the magic of Linux. But Linux is not only for old pc revivals. Try it on newer hardware and it becomes a blast.

I really like this form factor, I wish laptop manufacturers made more like it. The closest things I can find on the market today are 3:2 ultrabooks but these always lack ports and are not upgradeable.

I love how Void is slowly becoming the new Arch.

Don't underestimate that laptop when you slap an ssd inside, friends. I finished Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines on it(yes with some trouble), played HoMaM3 on Mint Cinnamon and streamed 720p with no issues, used it for diagnostics, scripting, etc. Even did some hacking on it with Parrot OS. Now i use it to remote to my desktop and stream some games with Moonlight when I'm not at home.

I wish that Lenovo (or anyone) would make new computers just like this.

These really were awesome machines and fun to mod too! My wife is still using my old X61s that I modded back in the day with a beautiful 1400x1050 IPS screen, a hidden dip switch under the battery to overclock the FSB from 200MHz to 266MHz when required, a modded BIOS to enable full SATA2 speed among other things and the usual upgrades like a SSD and 6GB of RAM (8GB would be the max). The most important upgrade (at least back then) IMHO was the screen because the original 1024x768 TN panel was an absolute deal breaker since I actually had to get some work done on it. The upgraded screen came from a X60 tablet and even to this day it looks just amazing :)

I still have my old Asus EeePC 904HD. It's slow asf but I put Xubuntu on it and it helps me wherever I go to fix other computers problems. It also serves me as a spare PC if I do something stupid with my main PC. I'm not a fan of Linux (way too complicated for me, I'm a Windows guy) but I have to admit it's very light and ultra stable. Perfect for what I do with it =)

I just recently helped a customer with a Dell Mini 2012 he had lying round. Single core cpu, 1 GB ram and 160 GB mechanical sata hdd. He just needed something to browse the web with and maybe watch RU-vid with. After all the testing I've done in VirtualBox I decided on Bodhi Linux. It exceeded my expectations once we actually installed it on his machine. Would recommend. I think it would run even better on your thinkpad.

I like using Lubuntu for these cases. It's current version is 23.04, based on Lunar Lobster, and uses the LXQt desktop. Also, it is well known that we hardly need current CPU performance for simple office applications, which is what gave birth to the Intel N* and *U CPUs that essentially are stealthy time traveling devices bringen the user back to the mid 2000's.

I've got an X61 Tablet that I absolutely refuse to part ways with. It's a slightly slower T7700 CPU, but getting it to 6GB of RAM and a 240GB SSD turned it into something that can, like you said, really easily beat the plague of N4020-based 11.6" members of the Future e-waste of America Society. I've used a debloated Windows 10 on it successfully, but settled on Mint XFCE for the reasons you described, although I am kind of tempted to dig it out and give Void a shot now. That bump to 6GB was pricey, around $25 for a 4GB DDR2 SODIMM, but the added headroom was worth every penny. That's really what made Windows 10 usable.

idk why but since 2023 youtube started recommend me small youtuber and im glad of that, there is lot of good little youtuber like you, also im watching you on a linux mint, 13years old laptop (originally 2gb ram upgraded to 4) with intel pentium t4500 x), well thanks for this quality video, i hope you get a lot of subscriber, you already get me with this video ;)

I had used an old Acer Travelmate from 2005 until early 2024, 150GB HDD, 2GB RAM, Celeron dual-core 1.67GHz CPU, as my mail mule, running MX Linux 32-bit without a problem. Until the keyboard malfunctioned.

I still using my old PC with a i3 3220, 8gbs of ram and a intel hd 2500. On windows the performance is not that good, so I've been using linux exclusively for few years now. Today I use Window Managers(Wayland compositors) and the experience and performance are amazing for such an old hardware. I recently installed cachyos and it made watching videos on youtube a lot better with less cpu usage, something that I could never figure it out how to make it work under vanilla arch even though I follow carefully the wiki. About gaming, I been recently doing a lot of retro gaming with retroarch and the performance its good on the majority of cores available, except PS2 core, but some games do work using the PCSX2 emulator.

One things is very crucial to understand regarding hardware. You absolutely cannot compare computers from different era. For instance if you say 15 years old top of the line processor X is on par as model entry level model Y from like two years ago. They can be comparable when measuring some direct calculation based with some benchmark program etc. HOWEVER things can turn completely around if comparing for instance playing RU-vid videos. Now that couple year old entry level model can do playback possibly with like 5% processor load on 4K 60hz where older X model could struggle to run even 1080p 30Hz video. This is where many processor features come in and if someone is wondering why that example I just mentioned is possible if processors are essentially same when comparing calculation vise. But this newer model can easily support hardware encoding. This is very critical to understand when wondering why some older hardware seems to struggle with seemingly trivial task. Like that Chromebook in video can easily playback pretty much every single media without issues, where the old X61 absolutely can't. Don't get me wrong, I use a lot of old and new hardware and in many cases old hardware can do all the necessary stuff. But you can easily run into seemingly odd performance issues.

Yeah great video and more testing than usual. I find collecting old ThinkPads is addictive and the most interesting ones, certainly the best keyboards, are on the older ones. They also have a fascinating design history throughout, even the later Lenovo ThinkPad products which continue high-quality design not always found on their other lines. After using SSDs for a few years I find mechanical drives more reliable if not too worn. Windows 10 is not too bad on some of the 2012-era ThinkPads. I have also tried the desktop ThinkCentres but they aren't as durable as the ThinkPads.

Void is one of my all time favorite distros, love that sudo xbps-install. Great video!

Great video! My friend taught me to make sure these oldies but goodies have 2+ cores for decent performance and you mentioned that right off the bat. My first choice for an older computer is Bodhi Linux because of it's EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) pedigree. Max out the RAM+SSD and you're good to go!

I'm still using an HP NC6400 as my workbench laptop - it works, has a 900p panel for displaying schematics and YT videos and more importantly still works fine despite leading a tough life. With a lightweight distro the T2500, ATI X1300, 4gb ram and SSD are plenty fast enough.

It's crazy as hell to see that you have only 706 subscribers! This feels back at home, with a ton of the good ol' tech essay videos about old tech being used in nowaday purposes, and it's shocking to see that you're so underrated!

Linux put new life into my 2011 MacBook Pro that FINALLY in late 2022 stopped getting security updates and started to not be able to update LibreOffice or Firefox. It is AMAZING what Linux can make useable... I have a laptop that came with VISTA running Linux for the kids and playing retro games and it works actually really well for that and basic web browsing.

I still use a T420 (with a SSD). Perfectly fine for all my mobile computing needs, for more demanding tasks I'd want to use a desktop PC anyway. It doesn't even feel slow, XFCE runs great.

This is such a good video My parents actually gave me an old toshiba satellite from 2007 with the same cpu as this think pad. This video has given me the inspiration to upgrade it and run link on it to do some typing and som programming

Linux is beautiful both for old and new machines. I have a laptop w/ Ryzen 5 5600H and 16 GB of DDR4 and this bad guy was CHOKING in Windows bloat. Have Arch on it now.

T61, 8gb, 128gb, win11, usb2x3, usb3x4, the usb3 speed is 150mbps via express card, T9500cpu. Working perfectly, task manager always on to monitor cpu usage, handles everything very very well.

I still use my Inspiron N4110 running windows 7 as my daily. I don't do much more than use it as a TV running you tube 90+% of the time, but it's still quicker than my wife's windows 10 laptop, and plays you tube videos over HDMI without skipping unlike my kids windows 11 laptop.

Great video man this quality is what id expect from a channel with 2 mil subs

I installed Linux Mint 21 (2022 version) on a laptop made in 2006. Fortunately, the laptop had 4Gb Ram, SATA, and Gigabit LAN. The only upgrade required was a SSD. Linux Mint installed and updated like a dream. Job done 10/2022.

Love the vid. Concise, straight to the point, and everything is clearly explained and elaborated upon. Love, from a 2012 Dell.

A well presented video!👍👍Perhaps you could install an SSD., and make another video which shows how much the performance has improved. Linux Mint Mate version is my daily driver and I often restore and upgrade older computers and Linux gives them a whole new lease of life.

Debian install, will allow you to choose your desktop environment. I have that on my 2gb Lenovo Celeron Laptop. Just use it for general internet browsing. And some python scripting.

I have a zero % attention span, but I always watch good content to the end to give the channel an analytics boost. I have a 25 year old HP/Compaq "laptop" with a "Made for Windows Vista" sticker. (The sticker no longer matches the OS). I autoboot into an Atari ST emulator, and use it as a16 bit gaming computer. It's a Core 2 Duo with 4GB of memory (DDR2, so going to 8bg is out of my snack bracket - at $200 to $500 for an 8GB kit.) but it works fine for emulating a 68000 based system. I never throw out old tech, India already has enough of our tech-waste (and the associated health issues effect us all). I always find good reasons to keep stuff. Hell, I still have my very first computer (a TI-99/4A purchased in 1982!) Gets booted up at least a couple times a week. Thrusting obsolescence on things that no longer suit their original build purpose, is a deficit of the imagination. (Pushing 70 myself, so that has particular personal relevance)

I can't believe you don't even have a thousand subscribers! I really liked this video. Subscribed

If you get yourself a T60, it comes with an IPS screen, which was superior to the screens that came with Thinkpads for the next 10 or 12 years, until a few years back Lenovo had to re-introduce the IPS screens by popular demand. The T61 already came with a crap screen. I'm not sure about the X61, but I don't think it's an IPS. The problem with the T60 is the motherboard limits you to 3 GB of memory, even if you install 4, and even if it's a 64-bit architecture. So your choice is between the 60s with a nice screen but limited to 3 GB of memory, or the 61s, with an inferior screen but more memory. If you're a real Thinkpad enthusiast, you can make yourself a Frankenpad, which is a hybrid between the T60 and T61, with the benefits of both. You will also want to update the BIOS to the Middleton BIOS, which removes the original BIOS's wi-fi card whitelist, allowing you to install a modern wi-fi 6 card. Suitable T61 motherboards are extremely rare and hard to find, though. Not sure they're worth the money unless you're addicted to the Thinkpad keyboard and screen (like I am).

Loved the video! Great work!

Great video of a valuable project. Old Lenovo ThinkPad bricks just can't be beat!

I'm still using R61 for internet (except streaming movies) and programming. Max 4GB RAM, SSD and new battery. SSD gave huge boost. OS is loading in 30s. Before, it was 1m30s. Still it can play movies in 720p and MP4 from SSD in 1080p.

Helps a lot that this is 64-bit. You can run Debian on something older, but browsers etc. ore limited for 32-bit.

Really great video. The part comparing decade old laptops to Chromebooks is great. Chromebooks feel like products made just to end up in a landfill within five years. I have a windows surface laptop 2 that I recently put Mint on because windows was bloating way too much and was behaving very poorly. For a completely unupgradeable laptop, it's the best way to keep it alive for a much longer time.

Always fun to bring some new life to an old machine. I often have some old laptops around - been using a C2D laptop for a while during the lockdowns. Lubuntu, libre office, 720p RU-vid and emulation up to the first PlayStation is plenty of activities! Worked with 1080p monitor without any problems. I also revieved 2nd gen i5 Sony VAIO with Mint XFCE not so long ago. Now it is a web browsing and writing machine for an aspiring poet. Obviously, most of these things are only worth it if you got the laptop for free, as 100$ can get you a postleasing Ryzen 2300U/3300U (so, 4 cores, pretty powerful Vega iGPU) ThinkPad with 8GB RAM. And there is no upgrade to an old C2D laptop that can beat that, no matter the budget :) Multiple generations of dual core i5 laptops are even cheaper. Dual booting an older Windows (for x86 retro gaming compatibility) and modern light Linux distro (for safe web experience) might be a fun use case for a C2D laptop like that.

Nice quality video! Welcome back!

The displays on these older laptops are also sometimes better looking than those of sub-$200 laptops. I have a Vaio from 2002 that I use for period correct photo editing using cameras from that era, and the built-in display, while only being 1024x768, looks far better than the cheap panels used on low-end Chromebooks and S-mode machines. In computer sales, I order refurbished business computers for customers over letting them walk out with ultra-cheap new laptops. They are just...bad. Really bad. I'll usually put them with 6th or 7th gen Intel machines, though you can comfortably go back to 2nd gen and be good to go in Win10 for most tasks (good rec on the X220).

My man really hit up the Three Mile Incident as a test 🤯🤯🤯

idk if you read this but a channel called TekDoze stole this video.

SSDs all day. Especially on older thinkpads where you don't even need to open the machine to swap the old HDD. I've used my old Thinkpad T61 with an SSD and Lubuntu and it was fine. Even trusted it enough to do my school entrance exams with it a couple years back. I did also increase RAM to 4Gb, but I believe the SSD was a much more impactful upgrade. Unfortunately the Thinkpad's fan gave up the ghost last year. Amazingly, you can still buy them new - but they cost more than a complete second used T61 :D

Thinkpads and linux. My fav duo!

Thanks! First time seeing your videos and has a short, precise, calm environment Real life tests, real life use cases, not only based on using 100% of power all the time Subscribed!

I think mobile core 2 duos are socketed so it may be possible to upgrade it slightly. And it may have an express or pc card slot or maybe you could use the wifi card slot

This thing is the ideal low end programming needed for IOT or any sort of Arduino programming, I was thinking of getting something like a t420 or X220, but this video convinced me that even a good old X61 can get the work done, this one goes to my electronics bench, all for the 4:3.

"Better keyboard " I quote this so much! I sadly moved to a Chromebook from a Thinkpad T430 so I felt really the difference. I definitely took the Chromebook as a daily drive just for it's weight and better battery life (and the usb-c charger, but someone told me you can find adapters for most of the barrel jacks)

I found an old Sony Vaio laptop from 2007 with an OEM edition of Vista. Installed a 32x Linux distro called Antix and now it works quite well. You can very easily breathe new life into these older PCs with Linux

I used to use a laptop like that for a while, and it only had one GB of ram the three adtional GBs really helped it

I have two old Dell Inspirion 1525's from about 2008 which run modern Linux fine. One runs Linux Mint XFCE and the other runs Kali (again XFCE) without problems. I did replace the HDDs with SDDs in both to get a bit more pep out of them and I upgraded the memory of one from 2Gb to 4Gb from another old dead laptop. Good experiences had for undemanding workloads.

Until recently, I was daily driving this exact laptop at my work as a research assistant. i went for a used 128GB SSD, and a ghost-spectre Windows 10 install. It surprisingly does well to process documents, edit excel sheets, and even some slight multitasking (I used an external monitor for dual screen use.). it is still running, but the screen gave up, so will leave it on hand until I can repair it. (it has sentimental value.) just don't expect modeling and the like with it.

So cool when Linux brings back decades old laptops/pcs, back to life, making them snappy fast again.. until you open the web browser 😅

The core 2 line is still highly usable. I have a desktop and a laptop that are of this line. I also have a core 2 quad that can give even 1st and second gen i5 systems a challenge. Till we hit the point that software needs something in the instruction set not found in this chip (like what happened to the Pentium 3 line several years ago), for basic single tasks they will be just fine.

I'm still using my 2013 HP laptop on Arch to this day. But it is considerably more powerful than those laptops you showed on the video. I love how Linux systems still support many cases of older hardware, keeping it relevant to the modern age. In fact, the only thing really keeping these machines "obsolete" is bloated modern web desig making even simple websites require lots of computing power unnecessarily.

I had good results with antiX Linux running IceWM on a similar old LG laptop - it feels a little bare but it works fine. I even added xfce4-power-manager to dim the screen :)

Watched this on a 2011 Mac Mini with an i5-2415M Core 2 Duo running Debian at 2.9Ghz (according to neofetch...). I thoroughly enjoy using this machine nearly every day. Another computer saved from the e-waste pile.

These are fun to tinker with and revive with linux. Theres a ton of games that can be run with these.

I've watched about 1 minute of this video so far :). Amazing cinematography for a video about a laptop! Please upload in 4K, even if you don't film in that res. Since RU-vid has introduced '1080p Enhanced Bitrate' regular 1080 looks like garbage. Uploading in 4K will force a higher bitrate and make your videos look much better for everyone, even non-premium accounts.

1:28 pay close attention to the chips on these cheap no brand Chinese ram sticks. If the markings on the chip is not crystal clear(smudged or worn off), or if the numbers don't match between chips, then it means these chips are recycled and are from different batch. I would not buy these rams sticks. The Chinese people will not miss any opportunity to extract every last bit of value from junk. There is the business of harvesting old ram chips from junk and then use them to make "new" ram sticks.

That crazy idea of getting much more powerful card-sized subcomputer and linking it with X61 (using X11 forwarding or other thing) to make it daily driveable comes to my mind really often. x61s are too beautiful to become obsolete ;c

fun fact: watched that vid while changing termal paste in my maptop (2019) that also runs on linux :)

What's kind of magical with Linux is that the open source drivers on Intel and AMD GPUs support Vulkan natively on some GPUs that don't support it at all on Windows. I have an old MacBook Pro from 2012 that I use for various things. MacOS is a no-go on it because Apple does not support it in any capacity anymore. Linux however works great (with a few easy-to-fix tweaks). Sometimes I will play some very light games on it such as Pizza Tower, and This old 3rd gen intel with iGPU works fantastic with DXVK.

Hey... great job on the video. Mint+XFCE has worked for me on similar projects but based on what you have shown here I'm going to give Void Linux a shot. I would be interested in finding the sweet spot of old/cheap and high quality display and inexpensive batteries if that is a topic you would like to explore ;-) Anyway... subscribed!

Stands to reason that games from its Era would run well on it. We'll have the same experience with today's hardware in 20 years, most likely.

i've got one of those things, it runs surprisingly well with arch and can even handle KDE semi ok with 4GB of RAM, windows 10 is flat out unusable on this device though and even windows vista seemed to struggle somewhat (although that's more down to the HDD i had in mine initially)

Oh yeah, I've put "full fat" Ubuntu 22.04 on a few older systems (I am using the "Gnome Flashback" desktop though, rather than Unity or whatever, it has a more classic appearance.) I'd say the realistic minimum is like a Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM. Indeed, if you can get a 2GB system to 4GB do it, you'll run into swap pretty fast as you open a few tabs. The last C2D I set up booted to desktop in about 55 seconds off the HDD; you do end up with like 1GB RAM used at startup, but it can swap out about 600-700MB of that without any affect on the program you're running or the desktop. The battery life was brutal though, battery life went from 4 hours doing nothing to like 45 minutes playing a RU-vid video since it was running the CPU fairly hard. I'll note, these old Intel GPUs run 2D and video scaling fine, but the 3D support a) was slow as hell on them anyway. b) dropped in newer mesa versions. In general, all pre-shader supporting 3D GPUs (the ones that only had "fixed function" support) were dropped recently; there is still a "mesa-amber" package where they branched off that last version of mesa that supported these and intend to continue to fix any bugs and security vulnerabilities that turn up in it. You get OpenGL 2.1 (but slow as hell) with the amber, or OpenGL 4.5 through llvmpipe software rendering with current mesa; the GPU is so slow that I actually found the llvmpipe to be faster (still bad but a little faster.) My dad runs this piss out of a Core 2 Quad desktop (Optiplex 755) with 4G RAM and a 1TB HDD in it. He makes heavy use of Chrome, edits like 100s of page documents with lots of graphs and charts in them, tons of scanning and printing, and weekly Zoom conferences. Zoom maxes out 2 cores by itself, but it's got 4 so it works out OK. That thing has some problem due to successive Ubuntu upgrades (I assume it's probably got bits of upstart, init, and systemd all taking up bootup time..) and takes something stupid like 3 minutes to boot, but runs fine once it's booted.

bro is the definition of underated

Eeally interesting how old tech that seemingly junk can actually be turned into something useful if let into the right hands

I can say that current RHEL and Fedora perform great too on old hardware. The three parts to making it work is first an ssd, second setup tuned, lastly use a lightweight DE. I personally went with i3 ages ago on my main rig so its natural to plop that on my older rigs too (slight mod to the config for single monitor).

A week ago i had never seen Linux before. I saw a yt video, and revived an obsolete 2014 mac air with Linux mint and it runs 10x faster than macos did with 4x the battery life after using tlp.

Hey someone stole your video, titled " can linux revive this laptop"

I really wish people would stop saying increasing RU-vid resolution quality is pointless if your screen isn't as high as the resolution set. That would only be correct if the same bitrate was used for all resolution options.

Literally could of just bought a 12 dollar SSD and ran Windows 10 just fine. Depending on the speed of that HDD even 11 could of been possible without an SSD since 11 is easier on disk operations. Dont even need to upgrade the RAM if you're somehow that cheap. Windows memory management will take good care of that 2GB. Unlike Linux's piss poor MM, of course. You wont be running more than a handful of tabs, regardless of the OS, with that CPU anyways.

I bought a laptop in 2008, the HDD failed (Win Vista) and I got a new hard drive and installed Ubuntu Linux and used that thing as my only computer for many years

😍 Have the same exact laptop, down to the CPU, though I got the extended batt. Ran W7 well because this laptop was released with Vista support, but yeah, that's been EOLed. I tried running elementaryOS on mine but the DE was too heavy. Linux Mint MATE and xfce ran fine. Was looking into making it into a Chromebook a while back, but it was too old. Still think the Chicony/Alps keyboards on these are the best even when compared to modern ThinkPads. X220 was the last X series that had the older IBM-style keyboard, I think. I brought it once to a conference just before COVID hit and people were genuinely curious and asked if it was new, likely due to the 'novel' form factor vs 16:9/16:10 laptops 😂

Have an old 2013 HP laptop, after swapping the keyboard and installation of a modest SSD with Garuda XFCE (I use Garuda Dragonized on my Desktop, wanted familarity), it's been more fun and easier to work on than my more powerful 2019 laptop, and I had a extended capacity removable battery for it that works great. I've tried doing work on the 2019 laptop but it's a nightmare to open, Ive already had to epoxy one of the hinges back together and the slot for the M.2 drive is already dead after just a few months with a basic SSD in it, the next time I open it will be to gut it for parts. I plan to save up for a Framework laptop but until then my 2013 laptop running Garuda XFCE linux is my portable buddy, so long as I don't try to work on large Blender 3D projects it seems to handle everything just fine

For my software engineering peeps… yes VSCode, Neovim, and Terminator are available on Void Linux. I checked the repo list on their site.

My ThinkPad 560 runs Windows 95 just fine, and the only real issue I have is inability to connect just about anything to its single USB port: even USB flash drive needs a software driver. Which obviously you can't find these days. Other than that, it is absolutely fine.

Congarts for the editing man ! You definitely deserves more subscribers !

I think the most important upgrade you could ever do is use an SSD. Even the cheapest SSDs can make a computer like this behave completely different. It is night and day. Specially if you are using a lightweight linux + firefox, small amount of ram is ok. But HDD speeds makes anyone suicidal nowadays... rebooting, waking from hibernation, opening apps, become a chore...