Just thought I'd share this. My brother recently graduated college and gave me this laptop he had bought at walmart for maybe $500 5+ years ago. It has an intel 350m and 4gb ddr3. Out of curiosity when I saw that I could get a 120gb pny ssd for $30 at bestbuy. Went over their and grabbed on slapped it in and installed the lightest linux distro that isn't a pain in the ass to use (lubuntu). And now it's a perfectly capable reddit/youtube/basic tasks computer. The power cable needs to be taped to the desk so it continues to charge, the fans ramp up when cpu utilization hits 60% or so, and the speaker quality isn't the best but, it basically turned a laptop that was destined for a landfill into a usable machine. I'm typing this post on it now. Sure it's not as fast as my i5 desktop on the other side of the house but, it's not even worth walking to the other side of the house to do basic tasks right now. I disabled the trackpad and use a standalone mouse i had in my drawer and maybe plan to pick up some cheap speakers but, otherwise perfectly happy with the return on investment. SO if you have kids and they want a computer consider doing something like this. TLDR old piece of crap computer is still perfectly usable if you don't need anything fancy
July 22, 2018 at 11:05AM
