Laptop Project

[Keith W]

Since buying my new laptop last year the old one has just been sitting gathering dust in the cupboard.

The old one is in pretty good nick cosmetically & the only problem it has is the battery no longer holds a charge.

The laptop is a Compaq Presario C300 series.

Anyway I have decided to drag it out and try and give it a new lease of life and make some kind of use of it.

First on the list will be to get a replacement battery.

Next will be to get some new RAM, it has 1GB in it at the moment and can take up to 2GB so will be ordering a 2GB kit for replacement.

It also only has an 80GB hard drive in it at the moment so will be getting a replacement for that at some point as well.

At the moment the operating system is XP and I may replace that with a flavour of Linux.

I shall enjoy doing this little project and who knows I may even post some pictures of my progress

 

[Keith W]

Well a new battery is on order and should hopefully be here by the end of the week, need to pop that in and see if all works well and holds a charge before proceeding.

The hard drive currently installed is an 80GB 5400rpm one, I am looking to replace it with a drive around 250GB, the thing is though do I replace it with a 5400rpm or a 7200rpm one?

 

[LongLensPhotography]

always 7200rpm if possible or preferably SSD from ebay (it will only use SATA I so why pay for III?). 5400 is slow as dog and I know that after dealing with them for the last 8 years.

Linux is a good plan - nice and capable OS, sadly without a few remaining apps like LR. I used to like Ubuntu but they seem to have started making the desktops into some Mac/win8 parody. Maybe good old Debian is the best now? or Fedora?

 

[Bambi72]

I have tried Ubuntu, Suse, and several others in the past, just for nerdy interest. I found Ubuntu the easiest to get used to as a Windows user, a basic linux book is handy too, like a DOS for Dummies if you dont know and linux cmds. It will probably run better than XP

 

[arad85]

I have tried Ubuntu, Suse, and several others in the past, just for nerdy interest. I found Ubuntu the easiest to get used to as a Windows user, a basic linux book is handy too, like a DOS for Dummies if you dont know and linux cmds. It will probably run better than XP

Ubuntu changes too much for my liking. You're always pretty much on the wavefront. I have 3 12.04LTS machines here (running xbmc and MythTV) and whilst they do their job nicely, I'd look for a different distribution if I were gong to use one on a daily basis for use as my daily computer.

I'd probably try Mint, Fedora or, going slightly more leftfield, run FreeBSD as PC-BSD. My home server runs it and I'm happier with that than any other of the *nix variants I have here (I also have a Fedora virtual machine for development for work).

The great thing about a "project" laptop is as long as you haven't started to rely on it being stable, you can just re-install a different OS to see what it is like....

 

[Keith W]

I was thinking I may go Minty with the OS

This is definitely just a "project" laptop, have plenty of other computer options in the house for the more serious stuff