In this article, I am going to discuss ways I gave my five-year-old laptop a new life.
In 2007, I purchased a used laptop to learn .NET programming. Since it was an old laptop, the machine barely had enough horse power to run Windows Vista. Soon, my job no longer require .NET programming, I promptly wiped the hard drive and installed Ubuntu Linux on it. What a difference does that make! My laptop started much faster, ran applications quicker and I did not have to worry about malware, trojan, or virus. Life was good.
Fast forward to last year, after several updates, my laptop was running a current version of Linux Mint, but it seems not fast enough. At that time, I had two choices: upgrade my memory from 2GB to 4GB, or upgrade the hard drive to SSD. After a little research, I decided on the later. I ordered a 40GB SSD drive for about $100. Again, the new drive blew me away: I was able to boot up my system in about 37 seconds (including the time to type the password). Applications now start much more quickly than before. I even compare my laptop with those of my brothers and it blew the newer laptops away. Yes, I know I am comparing apple with orange (Linux vs. Windows, SSD vs. hard drives). My laptop now makes an excellent machine for daily use: Facebook, email, web, watching videos, and development (scripting, C, C++).
In summary, if you have an old laptop, don’t hesitate upgrade it to SSD and install Linux on it (I recommend Linux Mint for ease of use). You won’t be disappointed. Not only your machine will run much faster than before, you get peace of mind knowing that your machine is realatively safe from malware and the like (relatively because there is no such thing as absolutely safe operating system).
Hai's DevBits 