Just shy of 18 years ago, I received a Dell Inspiron laptop as a graduation present. It was okay - it had a full, if cramped keyboard and a 17" 900p display, and performance-wise it blew my old overheating Rambus & Willamette desktop away. It came from QVC with Vista preinstalled and definitely built to cost. I kept running into problems with Vista, so shortly after dropping out of uni I reformatted and started single-booting Ubuntu. It was the first time I had used Linux outside of a VM.
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I got a full-time retail job after dropping out, but it was still years before I was able to afford another computer, so when my laptop started failing, I had to scab it back together. Broken keys were glued back in and avoided. The battery stopped charging and it became an AC-only machine. Eventually the HDD failed, and I replaced it with a drive salvaged from a broken first-gen Xbox 360, this time installing Mint MATE after bouncing off of the Unity DE. The machine was about 4 years old.
Eventually I saved up enough to build a budget desktop. I was always trying to improve the cheap thing, stalking ebay and salvaging bits from discarded machines. One night, I left the side off the case after trying in vain to install a full-length GPU. My apartment was always dusty from the tractors on the road outside my window, and I guess some ferrous dust must have settled in because the next morning the machine blew up (sparks!) when I tried to turn it on. So, back to the 8-year-old laptop.
Nowadays, running an 8-year-old machine is no big deal unless you are doing some cutting-edge tech work. My current desktop is 8 years old, and is perfectly capable of running modern games in 1080p60 on Ultra or Very High. It can run Blender, GIMP, KiCad, Vegas, any kind of production software I throw at it.
In 2015, an 8-year-old QVC-grade laptop was *struggling* just to run a 64-bit OS, but I developed my patience and we soldiered on.
I finally retired the machine in 2017. After 10 years of hard use, the battery was trashed, the AC port was broken and only worked at certain angles, the rubberized material on the yellow lid was breaking down, becoming incredibly sticky, the keyboard was almost entirely non-responsive, and the display would only show a solid block of red. To use it required you to prop it up weird and use an external keyboard, mouse, and monitor.
I still have it, out in the garage. Just in case.
I went and fetched it out. Updated the first post to correct the screen size. You can see where dog hair and dust floated onto and got adhered to the lid, and where at one time there was some paper on top of it that became one with it. Numpad enter is held together with scotch tape, less obvious is the number of other keys held in place by adhesives.
Couldn't help myself. What started out as a simple attempt to strip the sticky yellow plastic coating accidentally turned into an almost complete disassembly.
It's actually still exactly as functional in this state as it was when I last used it, and that percentage of functionality is greater than zero.
Can't believe how fast this thing booted. Also, slight correction, had to reattach the keyboard to boot - that's where the power button is.
I have no idea what my username is.
Wild, after I put the laptop back together, the screen works. Given how many times I dropped it, I figured it'd be all spidered instead but nope. It used to do nothing but display a solid screen of red.
I think in the morning I'll image the HDD and then start planning what to do with this old thing, I kind of want to put it back in service. With my limited current space, setting up an early 64-bit laptop as a WinXP machine would be pretty great fun, and I could even set up a dual-boot and play around with some low-spec distros, maybe even try a BSD or 9front.
I decided to try out Devuan 32-bit on the laptop. The install took much much longer than expected and afterwards it didn't really work. I decided I'd try to initiate a network install from the install DVD, but the DVD wouldn't read. Turns out the optical drive's laser had died - it'll spin-up but that's it. I swapped out for another slim optical drive, but it wouldn't quite fit, then I realized the original one from the laptop was a slim *IDE* drive.
Well heck. I don't have any of those.