Think before you junk!
Turning out a wardrobe recently I found an old laptop.
When I say old, it was one we bought in 2010.
Originally a Windows 7 machine, it had at some stage upgraded to Windows 10, but from that day on it never ran right.
The processor is a very ancient AMD Athlon II dual-core that is creaky to say the least!
When I plugged the machine in, it took over 12 minutes before Windows was open. Actually, I was a bit surprised it opened at all – it took so long I thought it had died and it was only a flashing light on the case that made me wait.
My first thought was to remove the hard drive (in case there was anything of value on it) and take the rest of the piece of junk to the council tip.
But then I remembered reading that Linux can revive the fortunes of old computers.
I asked on Facebook for recommendations on which version of Linux is best and almost everyone who replied suggested Mint.
So I found a website that gave step-by-step instructions for installing Linux Mint and, after downloading the installation package, decided to give it a go. The computer couldn’t get worse, after all!
It was all rather easy.
I won’t bore you with the entire process, but there was nothing hard about it. I just followed the instructions and selected the option to wipe my hard drive clean before installing Linux (you can install in alongside Windows, over the top of Windows or, as I did, to scrub the hard drive first).
The whole process took about an hour – and that included downloading the Linux Mint installation files (which was quite slow).
The end result is a laptop that boots into Linux Mint from ‘off’ in 83 seconds.
That might still sound a bit slow, but it compares very favorably with the 727 seconds that Windows had previously taken!
I felt right at home!
My first big surprise, never having used Linux before, was how familiar it all feels. It isn’t Windows, but it feels a lot like it as the screen layout is virtually the same.
The second surprise was that almost all of the programs I most regularly use on Windows are also on Linux – and as they come with the installation, you don’t even have to download them!
So far I have found Audacity, GIMP, Firefox browser (I have also downloaded Chrome so I can access Google Docs), Thunderbird (the email program I always use), the full LibreOffice suite, Filezilla (my preferred FTP program) and loads more.
And as Mint is built on the Linux Ubuntu code (I’m pretending I know what that means) it can run any program written for either Mint or Ubuntu. That covers thousands of free programs that you can access through the Software manager built right in to Mint.
I am seriously impressed.
So much so that I am tempted to install Linux Mint on my much more up-to-date laptop that is beginning to slow down a bit and has started to throw up a few Windows errors.
I plan to use the old laptop – that is now nowhere near so creaky – for a few weeks to get more used to Linux and get a better impression of its strengths and weaknesses. But right now I am very happy I saved the old machine from the rubbish tip!
