“What upgrades and modifications have you made to your old netbook?”

I recently wrote about my still-working, antique, “made-for-XP” netbook as part of a fun PC-vs-Mac discussion here.

Apparently — judging from the popularity of the post — there are a lot of other people out there maintaining seriously old PCs, too! For example, correspondent “twinmustangranchdressing” asks:

“What upgrades and modifications have you made to this netbook? What OS is it running now? I have an old Atom-based ASUS netbook myself that I use to keep the backup of my KeePass database (which I update manually whenever I make any changes to the database on my main PC) in order to keep it away from ransomware. (I don’t have this netbook connected to my network.) I’m wondering if there’s more I could be using it for.”

Most of the hardware is on the mainboard, and thus is not upgradable.

RAM is theoretically upgradable, but this was never intended to be a long-term use PC (it was a temporary, emergency replacement), so I’ve never added to the original 1GB of RAM. It’s still a very low-RAM PC.

I did change the HDD: A few years back, I replaced the old 160GB hard drive with a hand-me-down 128GB SSD of very early vintage. That change made the old netbook somewhat tolerable to use — functional, but not fast or fun — even up to Windows 10.

To get useful work done at a reasonable pace, and without putting new parts into antique hardware, I converted the netbook to Linux Lite, a lightweight Debian/Ubuntu distro that’s actively maintained and updated.

There are a gazillion other small-footprint Linuxes available, too (examples), and just about any of them can live happily on yesterday’s underpowered hardware.

I don’t particularly recommend using 10+ year old hardware, but it’s nice when you can. 🙂

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