Bringing new life to your trusty old laptop
Revival
© Kirill Makarov, 123rf
A few years ago, I bought an IBM ThinkPad T41p. It's a great machine that served me well for a long time, although for the last year it mainly sat on the shelf. I had some free time at hand, so I decided to give it one more chance.
How many times have you had to put away an old laptop because it simply could no longer keep up with demands? Sure, it had convenient keyboard, silent fan, high-resolution display, and a sturdy old-school case – plus it didn't get hot so easily – but, unfortunately, it was too slow for daily tasks.
A few seconds for opening a new tab in Firefox had become just too long to wait. Even though you had gotten used to this old piece of hardware, you threw it away. It's dead anyway, right? Not necessarily: With a little bit of effort and some open source tools, you can revive your old laptop and run it for another year or two.
Introduction
Reviving an old system requires some attention to both software and hardware. The first and easiest step is to switch to a lightweight Linux distribution, environment, and applications. If you want to go a step further, get to know the process priorities. Finally, you can experiment with running your system (or part of it) from RAM instead of the hard drive, although running in RAM is a trade-off: In many cases, memory might be too scarce to spend it on holding the whole operating system.
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