This laptop was originally sold with Windows 7 32-bit edition installed. Even back then it was really unresponsive and clunky. After several years of it lying around and being useless, I decided to do a really lightweight debian install on it.

And guess what? It can do so much more than sit idly in some landfill.

Now I can use it to write my study notes in neovim (gives me a good excuse to learn vim, and I’m learning slowly), listen to music with gst123, learn c and c++, torrent large files with transmission-cli and qbittorrent, and the list goes on…

I mostly just use tty. I hit “startx i3” if I absolutely need a GUI, but for everything else, tty. I use links2 for Wikipedia, online resources and browsing memes which is already a big chunk of my internet usage. I was really giddy when I saw Tor browser had a 32-bit version, it runs surprisingly well even with less than 1 gigabyte of memory (unless I visit some really bloated sites)

I can’t play videos though, that’s the one major thing it can’t do. The integrated GPU is unsupported so playing videos or 3d-gaming is out of the question.

BTW is there a lemmy instance/frontend I can use via CLI or links2?

  • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
    12·
    1 month ago

    I also have an old shitty computer from Acer with 4gb of RAM lying around.

    I feel a bit guilty about not using it, but I’m already sharing my time between my Surface Go 1 (daily driver) and my girlfriend’s 2012 MacBook Pro, so I wouldn’t know what to do with it.

    If anyone has an idea, I’m listening 👂

    • maliciousonion@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      4·
      1 month ago

      If it can play video at a reasonable quality, hook it up to a TV, fill it with torrented movies you want to watch and you’ll have your own home entertainment system.

      That’s one idea. If it can’t play high quality videos there are still a lot more uses for it.

    • qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website
      4·
      1 month ago

      Remote backup server would be my suggestion.

      Configure it with a VPN to talk to your home network and set it up at a trusted friend’s or family’s place.

      I do this with a raspberry pi and an external HDD that takes daily/weekly/monthly snapshots, with daily rsync. Works nicely for me.