Resurrected an older Dell laptop with Linux
Don M
Posts: 1,652
I have this Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop that I bought new probably 8 years ago. Has Windows Vista in it. 2GB ram and 120GB HD Intel Core 2 Duo processor. Its always been a good laptop and always liked the look and feel. Its very clean and hate to get rid of it but got tired of dealing with the Windows updates and this and that that won't be supported anymore etc... Didn't want to update Windows so I thought I'd give Linux a try.
I downloaded Debian with KDE first and tried a live DVD installation. Booted up and everything worked except the WiFi. This laptop has a Broadcom chip in it and there are all kinds of comments about trying to make that work. Played around a bit but no immediate luck. So I thought I'd try a different flavor. Looked at Ubuntu. Seems as though more people had good luck getting that to work on this model laptop so I downloaded Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to give that a try. Wow! Everything worked out of the box! I was so impressed that I went ahead and did a dual boot install. I was going to eliminate Windows all together but just in case the Ubuntu didn't work out I'd thought I'd wait.
This thing flies now. Quick boot up etc. Now I'm looking at upgrading the RAM to 4GB and putting in a 250GB SSD. I'm not sure how to preserve the Windows portion to transfer to new SSD but will look into that.
Pretty happy thus far...
I downloaded Debian with KDE first and tried a live DVD installation. Booted up and everything worked except the WiFi. This laptop has a Broadcom chip in it and there are all kinds of comments about trying to make that work. Played around a bit but no immediate luck. So I thought I'd try a different flavor. Looked at Ubuntu. Seems as though more people had good luck getting that to work on this model laptop so I downloaded Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to give that a try. Wow! Everything worked out of the box! I was so impressed that I went ahead and did a dual boot install. I was going to eliminate Windows all together but just in case the Ubuntu didn't work out I'd thought I'd wait.
This thing flies now. Quick boot up etc. Now I'm looking at upgrading the RAM to 4GB and putting in a 250GB SSD. I'm not sure how to preserve the Windows portion to transfer to new SSD but will look into that.
Pretty happy thus far...
Comments
Have fun with that SSD! It will make a big difference in performance, even on an old machine like that.
I think too that I would not have bothered upgrading an old laptop to the extent you have either, maybe add some extra RAM if it's laying around, but that's about it. As for Windows I prefer to run that inside VirtualBox inside Linux.
However good to hear you are happy with the results.
The nice thing about going the SSD route is that it saves you money if you ever upgrade to something else - the SSD will be good for a long time! Just move it with you to your next computer
Depending upon the SSD itself that is, and their failure rate. I had a friend''s MacBook where the SSD died absolutely and completely, which apparently is not at all uncommon. So rather than appear to run slower and slower or losing memory and make the Mac look bad, they are simply programmed to fail, or so it seems.
I've had other SSDs and even in older tablets and phones you find that even after you reset everything and clear it out that it still runs slow, real slow, and I know it's not the system or the apps. But then again there is quality SSD too and they are getting better. Any thoughts anyone?
Yes I have thoughts....
Basically whatever storage media, hard drive or SSD or whatever, it can fail catastrophically at any time.
Treat it all as temporary and disposable.
Basically every machine I use now a days is disposable.
If you have important data you want to keep forever, well, I don't know what. Distribute it over as many different media and cloud services as you can find. Get it printed on archive quality paper. Chisel it into stone.
Meanwhile, the Samsung EVO SSD supporting this machine is the best upgrade to a PC I ever made. Still fast as hell after one year. I'm never buying a spinning disk again.
Perhaps it dies any time now. Meh, soon replaced and on the air again.
Oh yea... I made that mistake once. Check this out
http://www.serenux.com/2011/02/howto-monitor-the-progress-of-dd/
It's only copied 36GB in 4 hours...2.4 MB/sec This will take forever. At this rate it won't be done till 1AM
Perhaps I missed a point, what are you copying from where to where?
I'm not sure I know anything that will make a faster device to device copy than dd.
Did you specify block size, "bs", when you ran dd ?
That is: block size is one mega byte.
Half the fun was getting it to be consistent.
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erco why are your robots now buying the house across the street?
I always chuckle when I hear the sales people sell an expensive laptop based upon how fast it boots. Of course I run into many people that believe that a laptop needs to be shutdown when they are finished and then rebooted next time they need it and then reopen everything they had open last time etc. That's why they "need" fast boot
Anyhows, you won't be able to change your partitions while running Linux from the SSD so boot live and run gparted from there. Remember with the older bios you can only have four primary partitions so you might even make one of them an extended partition. Include a swap file as well, say around 8GB or so.
Gparted is a GUI, so it's nice and easy.
The swap is good to have, but would have been a lot easier before copying your drive. I'm guessing you have four partitions now, so creating swap would require deleting one and making room for the extended partition.
I wouldn't worry about it. Linux if great on memory - so long as you're not running a VM or two instances of some big Java IDE like eclipse or IntelliJ, you should be fine.
And the first non-Intel running of Linux hear was on a Raspberry Pi, following that with a Pogo Plug.
So good luck with your endeavors. And be careful.
Jim
Probably, but see here, linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/ that is where I went to find the drivers for the Broadcom B43 series of driver firmware. I already knew I'd need the routines to manage it, and obtained them from the sources cited for building packages for Slackware Linux.
Even if you do try and jam in that Ubuntu driver set, you're still going to find yourself traveling down the path that I went with regards to firmware management.
1) Kernel support. Does the kernel have a driver module for whatever it is. I suspect Debian does.
2) Firmware. The binary blob of code that gets loaded into the device. Often Debian does not include that by default. Being closed source and all that.
Put packages and installers are available for such things:
https://wiki.debian.org/bcm43xx
Anyway, laptop now boots windoze 10 fast! Best investment I ever made. I backup to an external USB drive often.
The Dell laptop still works great. New battery, upgraded ram to 4GB along with the Samsung EVO 850 250GB SSD. Reinstalled Windows 7 along with Ubuntu. Boots in under 30 seconds to Linux.
So I was looking to do some spring cleaning and dug out a Sony Vaio laptop that my daughter gave to me about 4-5 years ago. She spilled water on it and it would boot up then shut down. Took hard drive out and copied all the files off for her back then. Tried drying out as best I could but it would only run for just under minute then shut down. Fast forward all those years.... I plugged it in, powered it up and it took off running and stayed on! So I found the original hard drive for it, installed it and it boot up into Windows Vista. Stayed running so I thought I'd see what would happen if I tried Ubuntu Linux on it. It worked! All the functions and peripherals all work without issue.
I let it run for a day or two just to make sure it was going to stay working. It did so I ordered another Samsung 250GB SSD and 4GB memory upgrade for it. Installed all that along with a fresh install of Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux. Battery seems to have pretty good life yet so I'll hang on for a bit before I order a replacement. So now I have another wonderfully useful laptop that is totally quiet and fast. On to my next one....
I have a Mac Mini that I bought new back in 2009. I use it a fair amount and as of lately it too has been annoyingly slow in launching apps plus running out of space on the hard drive. It originally came with a 120GB hard drive and 2GB of memory. I upgraded the memory a few years ago to 4GB. It had been upgraded to El Capitan OSX and that too seemed to run slower than the original version it came with. So I went ahead and backed up the hard drive to one of the 2.5" drives I took out of one of the laptops and installed a Samsung EVO 850 250GB SSD. I am impressed in how easy the re-installation of a fresh copy of OSX was. After that I "migrated" the files back that I wanted from my backup, upgraded the memory to 8GB and now it too rocks! Apple makes it easy to upgrade and re-install. So far I'm 3 for 3 in upgrades.
Next on the list was my Dell Optiplex 330 desktop machine. It has dual monitors and I have used it a long time for both programming and circuit board design. It originally came with Windows XP and last fall I decided to upgrade that to Windows 7 after all the annoying nags about this and that that will no longer be supported etc. That went ok but the machine was labored at times. It only has 2GB of memory and a 160GB hard drive. So I thought I'd upgrade this machine too. In goes another Samsung EVO 850 250GB SSD and memory upgrade to 4GB. Going good until upgrading the memory. It didn't like the 4GB (2 2GB DIMMs). I could plug only 1 2GB DIMM into either socket and it would work fine but if I added the other 2GB DIMM then it would complain. Wouldn't boot up and just beep a code. Looked up the code on Dell website and said there was a problem with memory compatibility. I ordered this memory from the Crucial website and this memory was supposed to be compatible. So now I'm stuck... it was Saturday afternoon and no one around at Crucial. So I finished re-installing Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux and got all that working again.
So this morning after looking around the web for some solutions I was coming up blank. Somehow it dawned on me to look at the bios revision and maybe see if there was a update available. The bios revision was A05 and there appeared to be a revison A11 available. No notes as to what that might possibly fix so I thought I'd give that a shot. The update installed without issue so then I tried installing the second 2GB DIMM. Hey it worked! Booted into Linux and Windows and both show the 4GB memory. So now this machine is super fast and fresh.
So now I'm 4 for 4. I'm done updating machines. But the take away for me is how much little money I spent per machine to make them more than satisfyingly useful and the ease of which Linux installed and just works. No reason for me at this point to even consider a new computer.
But I'm not sure what you are implying. Is it that Linux was some how behind and had to catch up?
That is contrary to my experience since 1996.
But yeah, well done Don M for showing what can be done.
In the sense of compatibility, it has come a long way. In the short 9 years that I've been using Ubuntu, we've gone from laughable dual-monitor support to seamless. Many more printers are now compatible. Wirelss isn't a problem. Graphics drivers are everywhere, and even some open source ones.
I know in another thread you were wanting some clarification of terms, so I shall here. In this context, I am referring to "Linux" as more than just the kernel. I am including drivers, desktop environments, word processors, IDEs, and so many others. In those respects, Linux was (and still is to a certain extent) far behind Windows. It's also come a long way in supporting big-name games with the help of wine and PlayOnLinux, though there sure is a long ways to go still.