Rescuing old laptops with the help of Linux

I spent the weekend reviving 2 old laptops. Both  have more than 10 years on them. The Compaq one had recently been upgraded to Windows 11 from Windows 7. Big mistake! It resulted in a sluggish barely useable laptop. The second was an old Dell XPS 15 from my Uni days. It was running Windows 11 well but it would randomly blue screen so it was pretty useless.

Enter LXLE OS. This is an Ubuntu based distro using the lightweight Lubuntu LTS distro but with some improved UI elements.

I downloaded the image which was about 2GB and created a bootable USB driving using Rufus. Plugged it into the laptops and it did its thing.


Both laptops are working very smoothly. Wifi, bluetooth, graphics and audio work fine. I was even able to set them up for coding using Docker and Vscode. The Dell XPS has not blue screened since switching. 

LXLE comes preinstalled with a lightweight browser (I installed Firefox anyway), Libre Office, some simple games and other useful apps. The UI takes some getting used to. But other than that, its golden!! 


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