Resuscitating Old Laptops

An acquaintance asked me some time ago to resuscitate an old laptop that had ceased to function. It had been running Windows. The laptop, an Asus X401U, dates back to about 2012 when it was being sold for US$280 as a cheap netbook. It has a Celeron processor running at 1GHz with 2GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive. The graphics are integrated Radeon and eat into the already meagre memory. Most versions of this laptop came with 4GB of RAM but not this particular model. See Figure 1.

Figure 1: Asus X401U

I used a program called Rufus to create a bootable USB for installing Windows. This is a fast and powerful little program. I had managed to download the ISO for a stripped-down 32-bit version of Windows 10 that was suitable for the laptop's weak specifications. Despite many attempts I could not succeed in installing Windows. See Figure 2.

Figure 2

I then downloaded the ISO of lubuntu, a lightweight version of the fully-featured Ubuntu, and used Rufus to create a bootable USB. This installed without any problems and the laptop is at last useable again. It still takes over two minutes to boot to the startup screen but once up and running it performs satisfactorily. It's only useful for Internet browsing and simple word processing but that's often enough for many users. See Figure 3.

Figure 3

The lesson to be learned from all this is that these older laptops are ill-suited to run Windows but can be made quite serviceable by installing a lightweight Linux OS like lubuntu via a simple tool like Rufus. Once the ISO for the OS has been downloaded, Rufus will quickly create a bootable USB from which the OS can be run even without installation to the laptop's hard drive. This is useful for trialing the new OS and, if satisfied, it can then be installed on the hard drive.