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Anybody ever dump Windows for Linux?

The Tradition

The Tradition

HR King
Apr 23, 2002
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I have an old piece of crap Dell notebook that I attach to my old school receiver to play music in the game room and out by the pool here at Tradition Manor. It's basically become unusable because there's no memory storage. Windows takes up so much hard drive space that it runs like crap. I got to wondering if replacing Windows with Linux might make it a zippy YouTube playing machine. Anyone done this?
 
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The Tradition said:
I have an old piece of crap Dell notebook that I attach to my old school receiver to play music in the game room and out by the pool here at Tradition Manor. It's basically become unusable because there's no memory storage. Windows takes up so much hard drive space that it runs like crap. I got to wondering if replacing Windows with Linux might make it a zippy YouTube playing machine. Anyone done this?
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Can you elaborate on why you think the amount of hard drive space used by Windows determines how fast the PC runs?
 
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SB_SB said:
Can you elaborate on why you think the amount of hard drive space used by Windows determines how fast the PC runs?
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Without going to get the stupid thing and booting it up to see the actual stats, this particular machine was bought as a Dell "doorbuster" several years ago, was loaded with Windows 10, but barely had any hard drive space left beyond what the operating system was taking up. Still should have been fine for using the internet. Then a year or two later, there was a major Windows update that was too large to install. I had to delete all kinds of crap to install it, and now it simply doesn't have the hard drive space for file swapping and runs slow AF. Once you get it booted up, you can tortuously get the browser going and fire up a YouTube playlist, and then it'll play without problems. But it's ridiculous how slow it is to get there.
 
Unless you have a 80GB hard drive you should have enough space for Windows 10. Try running Ccleaner or reset the PC and don't keep files.

Click start and type reset this PC. To try a PC reset.

Ubuntu is a pretty user friendly version of Linux.
 
Moral said:
Unless you have a 80GB hard drive you should have enough space for Windows 10. Try running Ccleaner or reset the PC and don't keep files.

Click start and type reset this PC. To try a PC reset.

Ubuntu is a pretty user friendly version of Linux.
Click to expand...

Did all that. Did a complete reinstall, in fact. Still had to delete a bunch of stuff so that the big bad update would install, and then it ran like crap.
 
SSDs are crazy cheap now. You can grab 120gb ones for 20 and 30ish for 240GB. Depending on your laptop it isn't hard to swap the drive. Worst case scenario is a bunch of screws and a guitar pick to seperate the bottom from the laptop. Best case it is one screw to get to the hard drive.
 
The Tradition said:
Without going to get the stupid thing and booting it up to see the actual stats, this particular machine was bought as a Dell "doorbuster" several years ago, was loaded with Windows 10, but barely had any hard drive space left beyond what the operating system was taking up. Still should have been fine for using the internet. Then a year or two later, there was a major Windows update that was too large to install. I had to delete all kinds of crap to install it, and now it simply doesn't have the hard drive space for file swapping and runs slow AF. Once you get it booted up, you can tortuously get the browser going and fire up a YouTube playlist, and then it'll play without problems. But it's ridiculous how slow it is to get there.
Click to expand...

I highly doubt that your hard drive is that small. My guess is your problem isn't hard disk space but main memory. If the PC is doing a lot of swapping then that's your real problem and that's main memory. Any PC that's swapping is going to run extremely slow. You need to run task manager and see what the memory usage is.

To your original question, you would need to check the system requirement for the Linux version you would install and see how that compares to Windows 10.
 
The Tradition said:
I have an old piece of crap Dell notebook that I attach to my old school receiver to play music in the game room and out by the pool here at Tradition Manor. It's basically become unusable because there's no memory storage. Windows takes up so much hard drive space that it runs like crap. I got to wondering if replacing Windows with Linux might make it a zippy YouTube playing machine. Anyone done this?
Click to expand...

Why not just spend $50 to put a new SSD into it?
 
The Tradition said:
I wouldn't spend $1 on this.
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Depends how much value you place on your time waiting for a slow computer. Maybe you feel like you’re coming out ahead not spending that dollar.
It’s subjective, so you could be right.

Since you don’t want to spend any money, might be easiest to download the bootable image Dell provides and reimage the machine.

Rufus is a free utility you can use to create the bootable drive.

Re-image to factory (after copying off anything that matter first) and the run Dell Command Update to get the latest hardware drivers and then let Windows update pull the latest roll-up build.

This will take about 30 minutes of your time and a few hours total to complete. But it won’t cost you anything if you already own a thumb drive that is at least 8GB in size.
 
I buy fairly shitty laptops for home use. I do this knowing in 3-5 years I will toss it and buy another.
 
The Tradition said:
I have an old piece of crap Dell notebook that I attach to my old school receiver to play music in the game room and out by the pool here at Tradition Manor. It's basically become unusable because there's no memory storage. Windows takes up so much hard drive space that it runs like crap. I got to wondering if replacing Windows with Linux might make it a zippy YouTube playing machine. Anyone done this?
Click to expand...
convert it to a chromebook.

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-...top-into-an-awesome-chromebook-for-your-kids/
 
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