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How To Make Good Use Out Of An Old Laptop

Bodhi LinuxA few years ago, I was going to take an old laptop to the recycling depot. I bought it fourteen years ago. It came with Windows 7 installed. Later I tried to put Windows 10 on it, but it slowed to a crawl and was basically unusable. Then I read an article in PC Mag that told me I could make use of it by install Linux. I've tried several distros. Distros is a term that refers to different types of Linux operating systems.

Recently, I heard about Bodhi Linux, and you don't have to have a powerful computer to run it.

Bodhi Linux 7.0.0, System Requirements:

Minimum:

  • 32bit, 500MHz Processor (including Non-PAE)
  • 512MB** of RAM
  • 5GB of drive space

Recommended:

  • 64bit, 1.0GHz processor
  • 768MBย of RAM
  • 10GB of drive space

I thought I would load it into Gnome Boxes, and take it for a test run. I assigned it 100G of disk space and 4G of RAM. This is what the laptop has...

[video width="1920" height="1080" mp4="https://stevemaclellan.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Bodhi.mp4"][/video]

If you go to the Bodhi Linux homepage, you will see it looks different than the one in the video. It comes with several themes installed, or does with the version I downloaded to install. I installed the App Pack Release, which comes with some software packages pre-installed.

Bodhi is Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) base, so it's a stable operating system, where you will find everything pretty well works as it should. It's attractive and nice and snappy on my old laptop. It's very impressive.