I have an eleven year old Samsung Laptop that used to run Windows 7, but would not upgrade. About three years ago, I put Linux Mint on it and gave it away. A few weeks ago I got it back. I thought I would install the latest version of Linux Mint and give it away again, but things were not quite that straight forward and obvious.
To begin with the battery will not charge, and the laptop was running ‘very’ slow. The dead battery was not unexpected, but the slowness was excruciating. It ran like my very first computer with cassette tape boot and storage. I would start it up, go make a sandwich, and come back, and it would be ready to use.
I did a web check for Linux distributions for old computers and Lubuntu Linux was in all of the articles, so I thought it was a good place to start. I downloaded the latest Lubuntu, put it on a USB stick, and nothing. I tried a different port and nothing. I went back to the bios, played with the boot settings and, nothing.
An interesting side note, I had to tell the bios each boot up where to boot from. The settings defaulted to the hard drive after each boot sequence. This Samsung Laptop has a CD-Rom built in, so I put Lubuntu on a DVD. It loaded to the desktop screen after about six minutes. I blamed this on the painfully slow CPU speed for which I had not discovered the bios setting for. Lubuntu installed, but that was about it. It was painful. Screens could not be resized for starters. Nor could they be relocated on the screen. Lubuntu was painful to use.
After pulling the laptop apart only to find nothing loose, I looked at the bios. The bios it turns out has a setting to slow the CPU speed when the battery falls below below twenty percent. A brilliant idea back in the day, but not practical having a dead battery. I turned the option off. It ran like the champ it is after that, well almost.
I thought I would try Xubuntu, it would not load Firefox web browser when running from the DVD. I did not try to install it. Linux Mint happily installed. Upon reboot however, all I got was a two tone flashing display, like a gray train crossing signal light. I checked around and found it is a sometime issue when a computer has two video cards. This Laptop has built in Intel graphics and a Radeon video Card. Even though I knew the problem, it would not boot so I could disable one of the video cards.
Next up was my daily driver, MX Linux. MX Linux bills itself as a middle weight Linux, so I did not hold out a lot of hope for it. Fortunately, the MX Linux Crew knows about issues with dual video cards. Pressing F4 on the Splash Screen and setting the video menu to on, let me disable a video card.
For the first attempt, I disabled the Intel Video, letting the system use the Radeon Graphics Card. I found the Radeon Graphics card had gone the was of the battery, so I reinstalled disabling the Radeon Video card. Installation went on without a hitch. The needed updates were almost 250 megabytes, and there was some auto building for a few items being installed. But everything was smooth and painless.
Upon reboot, this eleven year old Samsung laptop now can hold its own. It’s not blazingly fast, but it’s not annoying slow either – coming from someone who has a eleventh generation i7 in his desktop. So all turned out well.
My end point is this, don’t throw away ‘old’ computers, they have a lot of life left. Check the bios before installing Linux, in case there are any surprises, like cpu throttling. Try a few different distributions, some work better on different hardware than others. Finally, enjoy the process, there is nothing expensive to ruin, and lots of potential for someone who can’t afford a computer.
