Got an old slow PC or laptop lying around doing nothing? Give it a second life
Rather than let an old PC gather dust in my home-office, I thought I would try giving it a second life.
It's a 5 year old Dell PC and only has 256Mb of RAM - pretty crappy huh?It had been running windows XP, but even though I had only the bare minimum installed (Anti-Virus and Firefox), it still took nearly 8 minutes to become 'usable'! Even then it really couldn't play youtube videos, never mind anything more intensive. Instead I've downloaded and installed the free Ubuntu operating system. Installation was a peice of piss. Just download the installer here, tell it how much hard drive space to use and let it do it's stuff. I took about 60 mins to install - most of which was the "big" download. It came pre-installed with Firefox 3.5, which auto-updated to the later version on the first boot.It now boots up in 90 seconds. It plays full screen you-tube video without stuttering. I've got tweetdeck, dropbox and extremely fast chrome running... I've not even bothered with Anti-Virus software. I'm really impressed with how easy this was and how an otherwise useless PC is now very much back-in-action. This is especially true since we are working more and more in the browser these days! You still have to wait a few seconds while it has the occasional 'think' but overall - I recommend this idea to anyone it was SIMPLE.
