Old laptop... any ideas ???

[Steve Meliza]

My 6 year old Insprion E1505 that should be fairly similar to what you have. It has WinXP on it but that is nearly useless as it runs extremely slow. What does run really well on it is Linux/Ubuntu. My main tasks with it these days are email, forums, and other light internet use, but I can still watch videos and listen to music from it if that is what I want. At some point I could see putting it in the garage workshop area to allows me to listen to music (without commercials and DJs) and look stuff up on the internet as needed.

Using Ubuntu is really quite easy, just click on the firefox icon and up comes the web browser.

[Curt Harms]

My 6 year old Insprion E1505 that should be fairly similar to what you have. It has WinXP on it but that is nearly useless as it runs extremely slow. What does run really well on it is Linux/Ubuntu. My main tasks with it these days are email, forums, and other light internet use, but I can still watch videos and listen to music from it if that is what I want. At some point I could see putting it in the garage workshop area to allows me to listen to music (without commercials and DJs) and look stuff up on the internet as needed.

Using Ubuntu is really quite easy, just click on the firefox icon and up comes the web browser.

That depends. I seem to recall that Dell had a fondness for Broadcom wifi chips. Some Broadcom chipsets are easy, others are a REAL PITA. Notebooks that are pure Intel are about as easy to set up & use as Apple, install & use. Throw in hybrid graphics and certain WiFi chipsets (wired internet usually works out of the box) and Linux, even an easy one like Ubuntu or Mint can become a real project. For anyone who's curious, you can download the entire operating system and most used apps for free. You can then, using Windows and a free app called unetbootin create what's called a live install. This can be either a CD/DVD or USB drive. Boot off the CD or USB drive and you have a functioning PC (not fully functioning though) without touching the existing setup. Try that with Windows. If the little icon in the corner says that wireless networks are available and the screen looks good, your machine will likely work with Linux. It's a good way to check if a specific machine is worth the effort to install to hard disk and do the updates or get data off a trashed Windows install.

[Chuck Wintle]

yes the "Ubuntu live" feature saved my friend a lot of money when his computer, running Windows XP, crashed due to a virus. A quote from the geek squad was $300 to recover files and reinstall XP. Using Ubuntu live he was able to get all of his photos from the hard drive saved to a backup file at which point he reinstalled XP. lesson learned was to ALWAYS back up important files.

[glenn bradley]

One of my old laptops served as my internet radio in the shop. Toss all the stuff you don't need to load and it will boot faster. I just ran XP and used the browser with a home page setup as my favorite internet radio station. Threw a towel over it to keep most of the dust off.