Rejuvenating a four-year-old laptop - with Linux

Recycling: a short article about the installation and setup of a Linux distribution on a four-year-old laptop, including old data backup, partitioning, hardware compatibility, Nvidia graphics card drivers, desktop look & feel, usability, other considerations, and more. This ought to be interesting and budget-friendly.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/lg-laptop-rejuvenated.html


Cheers,
Mrk

 

I find that any x86 machine from within the last 5 years is pretty powerful; even laptops, despite the slow hard drives. My portable machine right now is an HP dv6701us, circa 2008 or so, and it works quite well even with KDE.

BTW, I'm a little curious about your partition arrangement. Why put the root partitions closer to the spindle?

In my experience this sort of placement doesn't affect performance, but does increase hard disk noise significantly.

 

Or innovate and convert to the modern GUID Partition Table (GPT), which is designed to work with EFI firmware, but also works with BIOS systems.
128 primary partitions available:

 

GPT is a separate experiment, for another box
Mrk