This can probably be inferred just from my general interests, but I have a very special love for old technology, especially old stuff I’ve had for a long time. My dad bought this Dell Inspiron E1705 laptop back in 2007, and for back then, it was BEAST. He bought it for his IBM job and kept it for his new job that he’s still at now. Obviously though, a 2007 laptop isn’t exactly the most reliable thing for any tech job past probably 2011. Apparently, there was some issue with the CPU I believe? And there was a program to send them back in to get them replaced. Dad did it because he was just curious and he also wanted to cause them the trouble of having to do it in the first place, and lo and behold, it was back in two months. I used to play games on it with my friends and sibling since it was set up next to my PC. My sibling proceeded to download a lot of viruses on it, but I’m pretty sure they hard drive that had all of that is dead now, since there’s three out in the garage…

Anyway, my dad was cleaning out the server closet (since he has one of those, he's a huge tech guy if that wasn't obvious already) and he found it in there. My dad knows I love old technology- he’s been trying to coordinate with someone from work to buy an old CRT monitor off of him so I could have it for a while now. I have two of his old monitors from 2005/2007, a very large collection of old phones and MP3 players, and a lot of dead hard drives. So, when I grabbed it one night to start messing with it, he got interested.

Back in the middle of April, I was able to find a spare battery for it and two chargers out in the garage. When I showed him I was running a diagnostic on it, he gave me an old hard drive for it and a USB to install Kubuntu onto it. He is certainly pretty excited about this too.

I wrote most of this while waiting on Kubuntu to install. It was going to be pretty slow since it’s going from a USB, but I was going to let it run for a while since I had to do something for a college project. This isn’t the first time I’ve installed Linux either thankfully, I tried out Mint a few months ago on a virtual machine which was really interesting. I was definitely excited to try it out on a machine that’s running it natively. And then, of course... it finished installing? So, I tried loading into it and all of the text was scrambled. I told my dad before I left that the install failed and I would try again when I got home, so he ended up taking a look at it. He realized the install went REALLY badly. While I was out, he ended up installing Mint on it for me instead. Kubuntu uses KDE which is such a pretty GUI, but it's a little too intense for this laptop. So, Mint with XFCE it is.

Even then, I was still super excited about this. It was the first time I ever actually got Linux to natively install on a laptop before since I had only messed with it in VMs. The first thing I did was install Discord, which actually didn't go that badly. It ran slowly and I had to install Vencord soon after to turn off a lot of stuff that was giving it trouble, but I managed to join a stream on it. Last year, I made a spreadsheet of all the different stuff I would need to consider if I switched to Linux. I knew what apps ran natively on Linux, which ones would need Wine, and which ones wouldn't work at all. That list came in handy for this project since I wanted to try to install as much stuff I could to not only test how it would work on Linux, but on this old laptop too.

I think though, the most interesting thing about my experiments with it is using Wine, Steam, and customizing the interface.

Wine is a compatability layer on Linux. Basically, it just makes it able to run .exe files so that stuff that never got a Linux port can be run using Windows programs. It took me a few tries to get it installed properly, but it worked SUPER well. I was able to install Battle.net because I wanted to try to play World of Warcraft classic on it, and although I did get it on there, the animation on the login window is too intense for the laptop so it freezes before I can log in. There's a way around it, but I never got to it. I was also able to get Needy Streamer Overload to run as well, which was... interesting. It ran, Wine did amazing, but uh... I haven't mentioned the specs of this laptop yet, have I?

So, pretty obviously, an old laptop from 2006 isn't exactly going to have the best hardware compared to computers of today. However, what I didn't expect was for it to be well... this bad. So, it has 2 GB of ram. Not a big deal, I was able to order new ram and bump it up to 4 GB, which is the first time I ever actually opened a laptop and installed ram. It took some tinkering but I got it to work. It has a NVIDIA GeForce Go 7800, which is The GPU Ever. It has a really hard time running pretty much any video games, and I had to turn off the dot animation on Discord because it made it mad... I don't recall the exact processor type now, but it was only 2 GHZ. So... it can run Terraria and that's kind of it.

And Terraria didn't even load. It would try to and then close itself. No error message or anything! I actually also got Minecraft to work, but um... I tried doing 1.7.2, which should have worked because when I played Minecraft on it back in 2014, when 1.7.2 was out, it worked fine. It corrupted and crashed. More than anything, I just find it funny. That's the extent of my gaming on it right now, but I really want to try to get WOW classic working on it. Maybe I'll try TurtleWOW.

Last thing of interest is that I completely changed the interface on it. I think my favorite part of Linux is how deeply customizable it is. Like, that's the whole point of Linux. But, I was able to customize the apperance of my laptop completely to make it look like the interface from Needy Streamer Overload, which was SUPER fun to do and it looks really awesome.