Can I do anything with my old laptop?

[wolfmcbeard]

I've dug out my old Dell Latitude e6510 recently and surprisingly it still powers up just fine after sitting for a few years.
Only problem is it's effectively useless for most tasks I'd put it through these days with it's i7 620m and 4gigs of ddr3.
I do want to see if I can load it up with higher capacity ram at some point and toss a new drive in it since I lost the old one.
Can I refresh this old hunk of metal and plastic to be useful for anything, or is it just a relic that while nicely designed, is better relegated as some kind of display piece?

[WhitetailAni]

It might be useful as a Windows 7 box for older stuff.

[jaslion]

The second. Its lack of hardware acceleration is what kills its usefullness. Coupled with an inefficient cpu

[wolfmcbeard]

1 minute ago, jaslion said:

The second. Its lack of hardware acceleration is what kills its usefullness. Coupled with an inefficient cpu

That was part of why I retired it quite some time ago, which is sad since it's the only laptop to this day that I enjoyed using and actually held up.
By the time I shelved it, i couldn't even get a stable framerate in Half Life 1, though I question if Windows 10 had a role in that.

[jaslion]

4 minutes ago, wolfmcbeard said:

That was part of why I retired it quite some time ago, which is sad since it's the only laptop to this day that I enjoyed using and actually held up.
By the time I shelved it, i couldn't even get a stable framerate in Half Life 1, though I question if Windows 10 had a role in that.

Windows 10 has only basic display drivers thats the issue. On an older windows (8.1 or older) it will be fine.

[wolfmcbeard]

1 minute ago, jaslion said:

Windows 10 has only basic display drivers thats the issue. On an older windows (8.1 or older) it will be fine.

Would 7 behave well on a sata ssd?
Pretty sure I can load up at least 8gb of memory, though I don't know the max supported on the machine.
I'd like to at least use it for web browsing and retro gaming, it used to be my main pc, so I feel like I'm doing it dirty after it kept me going for so long by not trying to find some life for it still.

[Dedayog]

2 minutes ago, wolfmcbeard said:

Would 7 behave well on a sata ssd?
Pretty sure I can load up at least 8gb of memory, though I don't know the max supported on the machine.
I'd like to at least use it for web browsing and retro gaming, it used to be my main pc, so I feel like I'm doing it dirty after it kept me going for so long by not trying to find some life for it still.

Yes, Windows 7 is SSD friendly.  Not sure if it's worth it, but it would make it snappier.

[jaslion]

3 minutes ago, wolfmcbeard said:

Would 7 behave well on a sata ssd?
Pretty sure I can load up at least 8gb of memory, though I don't know the max supported on the machine.
I'd like to at least use it for web browsing and retro gaming, it used to be my main pc, so I feel like I'm doing it dirty after it kept me going for so long by not trying to find some life for it still.

Course 7 behaves fine on an ssd.

 

Browsing on windows 7 is a risk and browsers have stopped supporting it. Your best option will be firefox + ublock origin on it.

 

Seems 8gb of ram is possible.

[wolfmcbeard]

1 minute ago, Dedayog said:

Yes, Windows 7 is SSD friendly.  Not sure if it's worth it, but it would make it snappier.

Excellent, should be a fun little venture then.
Probably not to be fair, but it'll be a nice little side project if nothing else.

[Dedayog]

2 minutes ago, wolfmcbeard said:

Excellent, should be a fun little venture then.
Probably not to be fair, but it'll be a nice little side project if nothing else.

I mean, I would do it.  I tend to get a used laptop no one wants, upgrade it with RAM and SSD, and then go... hmm, I don't need this, and put it on a shelf. 

 

But yes, fun project.  And relatively cheap too.

[powertoys]

Just throw the cheapest 120 GB SSD you can find on it and it will be more than enough for basic tasks. That i7 lacks hardware acceleration for modern stuff but it can still brute force through that. In raw power it's almost as good as a 6th gen low power i3.

 

Or you can use it as an "experimenting" machine...

[Darkseth]

If you don't want to use legacy Win7 Applications (Offline only, you shouldn't go online with Windows 7, unless you have no private Data on the Device), think about Linux.
Some light weight Linux distros will run much better than even WIndows 7.

 

Endeavor/Manjaro with XFCE if you want Arch, maybe Linux mint Cinnamon (or xfce too, but cinnamon is kinda windows 7 like~) if you like it debian/ubuntu based. Even with 4gb Ram it will run quite well.

[wolfmcbeard]

6 hours ago, Darkseth said:

If you don't want to use legacy Win7 Applications (Offline only, you shouldn't go online with Windows 7, unless you have no private Data on the Device), think about Linux.
Some light weight Linux distros will run much better than even WIndows 7.

 

Endeavor/Manjaro with XFCE if you want Arch, maybe Linux mint Cinnamon (or xfce too, but cinnamon is kinda windows 7 like~) if you like it debian/ubuntu based. Even with 4gb Ram it will run quite well.

I did try Linux on my older systems in the past, including that pc, but I always had weird issues that always made me rage quit back to Windows, such as steam just ceasing to function in Ubuntu, I don't know if that's changed since 14.04, but I did feel burned by that.

[Darkseth]

14.04 sounds quite old.
And Ubuntu did went some unpopular ways.

 

Since you have nothing to lose really, except a little bit Time, i'd give it a try. Manjaro for example is quite great for Gaming.

Maybe Fedora, or the Gaming-optimized Fedora project called "Nobara".