Breathe fresh life into... your old laptop
One of our really old laptop packed up recently (Core 2 Duo, 2 GB Ram, upgraded hard disk to ~290 GB). Used to run windows Vista earlier (for which support was withdrawn). We had been thinking of selling the laptop until I decided I will convert it into a chromebook by installing Chrome as the OS. In between the installation, I realized the 15+ year old BIOS does not support installing chrome from a bootable drive (using rufus) and the entire experiment crashed.
This was a few months ago and the laptop sat around in one of my cupboards accumulating dust.
Today morning, I noticed the laptop and thought, let me give this another shot. I searched around for the most stable Operating Systems I could find and came across several candidates- Linux based- Zorin, Ubuntu, Manjaro, Fedora, Chromium etc. I decided to go with Linux Mint 20.2 “Uma”? released on July 8th, 2021.
The entire installation process was very intuitive- minor issues with the wifi driver but resolved quickly) and before I knew it, the 15+ year old laptop was fully operational.
To top it all- I was able to add a very nice "Windows 10 Skin" over the Linux OS to make it look and feels like my latest Windows 10 desktop. (check out https://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com/themes/view/Windows-10)
Sometimes, thinking differently can breathe fresh life into seemingly broken objects/aspect of our life.
PS- Intentionally avoided talking about details of the code/process. If any of you are interested, I would be happy to explain the process.
Associate Director, Intelligent Automation
3 年This is awesome Rahul Sahai. Great out of the box thinking
Head of Operations & Supply Chain Management | Driving Operational Excellence | Global Supply Chain Leader | COO Aspirant | Six Sigma Green Belt | Sustainability Advocate
3 年Great work on bringing back the old one to life. I can't agree more on the looking at life from all together different perspective. Well-done. Will catch up to learn the details of the process followed. I have couple of laptops to try
Strategy | Analytics | Innovation
3 年Love it! “Sometimes, thinking differently can breathe fresh life into seemingly broken objects/aspect of our life.” Rahul Sahai well said!
Service Agreements Sales Manager, India and SE Asia at Caterpillar Inc.
3 年I have a 10+ yr old laptop working on windows 7 ...will have a look at this option.
Director , Cybersecurity at Deloitte
3 年Rahul Sahai Real interesting work !