Worth it?

[cs1857]

I have two older Windows laptops that are a little dated, but still (mostly) fully functional, save for a bad battery on the oldest one. Both of these don't support Windows 11. I figured I'd eliminate most of the junk on them and go with Linux since Windows bloat really slows both down.

The first machine is a 2011 General Dynamics GD8200--3rd gen i7, 8GB RAM. It was originally a Windows 7 machine.

The second machine is a 2015 Toshiba Satellite--Intel Pentium and 4GB of RAM. This was an interim purchase when another laptop was off for service many years ago. It is very much "a toaster" and slow. Originally 8.1 if I recall correctly.

So, worth it on these two?

 

[Brickwizard]

Welcome to the forums,
Have you read the first 3 post in this forum?
Both machines are quite capable of running Linux. The I7 will have no problems with any distribution.
The Pentium will depend on which processor, it will again run any distribution, but if it's a low speed [entry level] CPU you may be better off with a medium weight build.

 

[bwingbob]

If you spring for an SSD in the i7, I believe you will be very happy running Linux on that machine, you should be able to pick up a 480mb SSD for ~25$ us. Nothing to add to @Brickwizard comment for the second machine.

 

[wendy-lebaron]

Welcome to the forums.

Agreed but there has to be a way to check the quality of an SSD about to be bought, because some of them are "refurbished", euphemism of "lemon" or "plain junk". A mechanical hard disk out of a computer 12 years old could be a real drag with some of these fattened ISO's such as the Ubuntu flavors, and especially if the user wants to go crazy with installing apps with Flatpaks and that sort of thing. Alternatively if you consider getting a Linux OS such as Garuda to set up "btrfs" with system snapshots, then please investigate the SSD and don't take low price as the only consideration.

The Toshiba computer could benefit for an upgrade to 8GB RAM at least, and to SSD if it also has a "regular" internal HDD. It's more like my HP laptop which is 11 years old and originally came with Windows8.

 

[bob466]

I have a 12 year old Laptop that's running Mint Cinnamon 20.3 at the moment...runs just fine...it has 4GB of Ram and a i5 CPU which also came with w7.

The only thing I did was swap the HDD for a 500GB SSD about a year ago...the SSD makes all the difference...I'll soon be installing the latest version...Mint Cinnamon 21.1 and it will run great too...remember Linux isn't windowz...have fun.

 

[camtaf]

I run XFCE desktop (Devuan) on a 2GB ram, 1.2GHz dual core proccessor thin client without any problem, Linux isn't like MS, it is frugal with resources. Any distro you like will run on an i7 with 8GB ram.

 

[aforwood]

With small disk space, you can always just remove those programs/utils you don't need ATM to make room for others you do, and switch back when needed. The speed of downloading compared to Windows is noticeable and won't cause much delay, even with low memory resources and several programs running at the time.

You gotta push the system to see what works under what conditions before you get an idea of how to configure it to balance it all out.

 

[The Duck]

Start with creating a bootable usb flash drive.

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