Soldato
- Joined
- 12 May 2011
- Posts
- 6,345
- Location
- Southampton
Having built that desk the other day I had a hankering for a dumb project to do.
I found an old, cheap laptop on Facebook Marketplace - an Acer 5315 for £20, a pleasant 25 minute drive into the country.
This has a Celeron M (single core, 1.73GHz but at least I think it is not netburst era), 1GB of RAM, 5400RPM HDD and Intel X3100 / GMA965 integrated graphics. And running Vista!
It is in pretty nasty condition but we can all agree we've seen worse...
Start up took about 10 minutes to reach a functioning desktop along with muchbloatware. Some throwbacks including Youtube to MP3 converters, Quicktime player and Word 2000. I particularly enjoy the dog that barks when it detects a start up program - even AVG. Something called Spybot tried to prevent me disabling the sidebar from starting at start up. Windows explorer has an extra taskbar for encrypting and decrypting something. It is essentially unusuable. I ended up booting into safe mode and uninstalling most of the crap on it so I could run HWinfo and start downloading drivers.
Despite not being connected to my home network via ethernet or wifi it managed to connect to STRN_XXXXXX so no idea what that is about (VPN thing?)
So my plans:
Clean it to an inch of its life.
Upgrade the RAM to 2GB (unless it can take 4GB)
Throw in one of my spare 120GB SSDs
Socket M Core 2 Duo but I am mindful the current CPU is 25W and a C2D is 35W but the laptop is surprisingly quiet
Thermal paste etc.
Windows XP (or maybe a fresh Vista install!)
I found an old, cheap laptop on Facebook Marketplace - an Acer 5315 for £20, a pleasant 25 minute drive into the country.
This has a Celeron M (single core, 1.73GHz but at least I think it is not netburst era), 1GB of RAM, 5400RPM HDD and Intel X3100 / GMA965 integrated graphics. And running Vista!
It is in pretty nasty condition but we can all agree we've seen worse...
Start up took about 10 minutes to reach a functioning desktop along with muchbloatware. Some throwbacks including Youtube to MP3 converters, Quicktime player and Word 2000. I particularly enjoy the dog that barks when it detects a start up program - even AVG. Something called Spybot tried to prevent me disabling the sidebar from starting at start up. Windows explorer has an extra taskbar for encrypting and decrypting something. It is essentially unusuable. I ended up booting into safe mode and uninstalling most of the crap on it so I could run HWinfo and start downloading drivers.
Despite not being connected to my home network via ethernet or wifi it managed to connect to STRN_XXXXXX so no idea what that is about (VPN thing?)
So my plans:
Clean it to an inch of its life.
Upgrade the RAM to 2GB (unless it can take 4GB)
Throw in one of my spare 120GB SSDs
Socket M Core 2 Duo but I am mindful the current CPU is 25W and a C2D is 35W but the laptop is surprisingly quiet
Thermal paste etc.
Windows XP (or maybe a fresh Vista install!)