I have a very old HP Laptop with a 5th Gen i5 and 4GB ram and a slow 5400RPM 500GB harddrive... I never used this laptop, partly because I rarely use any laptop but this one in Particular was so sluggish with Windows 10 that I simply would get mad and turn it off when I ever tried to use it for anything.
I was (and am still) unwilling to pay a dime on upgrading this laptop, because I dont want to... The form factor is bad (for my needs as it is 17" laptop) where I would be much happier with a 14" or so smaller laptop... in addition HP seems to have gone out of their way to make upgrading anything as much of a pain in the a** as possible anyway.
The only reason I have this dumb laptop is because a family member asked me to look at it, and then changed their mind and bought a new laptop and left it here...
Whatever backstory complete after trying to see if I just wanted to wipe this laptop and take it to goodwill or whatever, I decided out of curiosity to download Linux Mint 21 (Xfce) live image and installed it on USB key... And I was pretty surprised everything works and despite quite underwhelming specs the laptop was responsive enough to not make me want to throw it out the window....
I did have one snag after using the live environment for about 1hr and deciding it was probably the way to go. I tried the install option which kept failing stating the attempt to mount a file system had failed... I messed about with this for a little while before finding out that it was having an issue with the EFI partition that was on the drive... used GParted and nuked all the existing partitions and then the install proceeded...
I havent done much with this machine installed spotify and browsed the web mostly ... but I am pretty impressed (the install error would have likely put people with no linux experience off I would imagine). But once that was sorted, having a reasonable backup laptop or something to use if the power blacks out, (with my mobile hotspot) (SoCal Edison can suck it), from what was basically ewaste as a windows machine is pretty impressive.
I was (and am still) unwilling to pay a dime on upgrading this laptop, because I dont want to... The form factor is bad (for my needs as it is 17" laptop) where I would be much happier with a 14" or so smaller laptop... in addition HP seems to have gone out of their way to make upgrading anything as much of a pain in the a** as possible anyway.
The only reason I have this dumb laptop is because a family member asked me to look at it, and then changed their mind and bought a new laptop and left it here...
Whatever backstory complete after trying to see if I just wanted to wipe this laptop and take it to goodwill or whatever, I decided out of curiosity to download Linux Mint 21 (Xfce) live image and installed it on USB key... And I was pretty surprised everything works and despite quite underwhelming specs the laptop was responsive enough to not make me want to throw it out the window....
I did have one snag after using the live environment for about 1hr and deciding it was probably the way to go. I tried the install option which kept failing stating the attempt to mount a file system had failed... I messed about with this for a little while before finding out that it was having an issue with the EFI partition that was on the drive... used GParted and nuked all the existing partitions and then the install proceeded...
I havent done much with this machine installed spotify and browsed the web mostly ... but I am pretty impressed (the install error would have likely put people with no linux experience off I would imagine). But once that was sorted, having a reasonable backup laptop or something to use if the power blacks out, (with my mobile hotspot) (SoCal Edison can suck it), from what was basically ewaste as a windows machine is pretty impressive.
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