So my wife has a 10 year old low end notbook. 500Gb of storage (HDD), 2GB of GDR3 RAM, and an intel Celeron Processor N2806. It originally came with Win 8, then she “upgraded” to win 10 and after that it was pretty much unusable. I am talking CPU and Ram about 80-90% in idle, opening a browser got everything down to a crawl. She mostly used it a storage and brwosing, watching youtube and occasionally to write. So I (also a Linux newbie) finally got the time to install a newbie friendly Os (Fedora) and it’s so much better! I am Talking 20%CPU usage and 50%(?) RAM in idle.
Install an SSD. They’re like 20 bucks these days. Also upgrade the RAM, it’s worth it even with the barebones CPU.
It’ll still slow down eventually even on the most lightweight Linux distribution for any task that’s not text editing. It would probably do fine as a home server for you to run Lemmy on if you avoid programs that need to be compiled!
I don’t think 2GB of RAM will be very pleasant, that’s what Firefox uses on my phone. I can still think of uses for it when you eventually get tired of the slowness, though.
If you’re willing to rip it apart and reuse the hardware, the screen can probably be used as an excellent external display if you put a case around it or a fake sun for lighting if the resolution is too low, putting the microphone in an enclosure would make for an excellent USB microphone, the webcam will probably work over USB as well, the hard drive can be a good source of magnets and very shiny disks for decorating your home, the speakers could be turned into acceptable enough set of Bluetooth speakers, the list goes on.
This video shows off what you can make out of old laptops if their life as a laptop is over.
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Thats a very creative way of using old Laptop parts where I would probably not manage to pull one of them off. I have already ordered 8gb of ram and a 500gb SSD to give it a few more years of life.
A thing you didn’t mention to improve thermals is to take it apart remove the dust from the cooler and maybe change the thermal past, that laptop came with windows 8 (released in 2013) literally 10 years ago.