Old Laptop Gets New Life

Thoughts & Feedback
#1

Here is what I did to install to Ubuntu Mate 20.10 on my old laptop:

HP Probook-4520s, Ram 4GB, 500 meg hardrive, Intel(R) Core(TM) i5cpu M430 @ 2.27GHz

Win 7 was pre-installed. Before I removed Win 7 I updated the Bios dated 2010 to 2014. The upgrade gave me UEFI/Bios Boot Mode. I selected UEFI.

Increased the Ram from 4GB(2x2)to 8GB(2x4). I checked the computer stores in my city & no one had the Ram I needed to do the upgrade. Hurray for Amazon. I ordered 8GB Kingston Ram and had it delivered within 2 days. The upgrade was tricky since I had to remove the keyboard to get access to the RAM. I removed 4GB and installed 8GB. I had some trouble getting the keyboard back in place but was successful after two attempts.

Then came the finale of installing Ubuntu Mate 20.10. Wow! The install went great with no problems! I have been enjoying Ubuntu Mate for the past two days after resurrecting my old tired laptop.

Great job on Ubuntu Mate 20.10.

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#2

Hello!

That ProBook performs well on Mate 20.10 especially with that RAM upgrade. I suggest to swap the mechanical hard drive for an SSD and you will see a big improvement. SSDs are becoming really cheap so you can buy one from Amazon aswell. I have an Kingstone 512 GB SSD in my Dell and performs fantastic with 20.04 LTS.

Be safe!

2 Likes
#3

Hello!
I'm using a thinkpad t420 with 8 GB RAM and Intel 3000 graphics card in dual screen mode and a ssd. I do photo editing of raw files (about 15 MB each picture) and some audio editing with it. This "old" notebook performs very well with ubuntu mate! I'm recommending this distro to everybody I know :slight_smile: