Found my old laptop....2008ish

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bowlofturtle

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I was looking for a solid workhorse type of laptop. Mainly for a garage laptop, pull up youtube videos or forum postings, download torrents and HDMI output to a TV.

I came across my old Dell Inspiron 1525, came with vista installed, i did a win7 update. This has to be a 2007-2008 model year, $500 bargain bin at the time. I gave it to my brother when i bought a new one and he gave it back maybe 2012.

Specs are roughly...

Pentium Dual Core T2370 @ 1.86ghz
2GB of DDR2 ram @ 667mhz (2x1gb)
Wonderful 15.4in screen with 1280x800 resolution.
160gb SATA @ 5400RPM
4 cell 48whr battery.... battery is shot. 15 minutes of battery life on full charge.
expressslot.


I'm thinking i can turn this thing into a nice little workhorse for $50-85 in parts. This laptop is amazing to take apart, I pulled the plastic panel off the bottom (6-8 screws) and i have access to the RAM, wifi card and CPU! 2 screws and i pull the hard drive out!

4gb (2x2gb) used ram runs about $12 on ebay.
new ebay china battery runs about $20
250gb SSD no name stuff $ 35
T8300 2.4ghz Core 2 Duo CPU $ 10

This puts me at $77 total shipped off ebay parts to make it somewhat solid.

My biggest debate right now is if its worth it or should i just spend like $350 on a Walmart special. I assume Walmart laptop has a 2-3 year lifespan. My dell dinosaur.... who knows. But $77 vs $350, the money i can save now and spring for an XPS13 2019 would be nice. Even tho i would not use it in the garage. Thoughts on this.... would this still be a slug from 2008? Like i dont need 350hp twin-turbo v6 power, but a modern 200hp 4 cylinder would be nice and not the 60hp geo metro i have now.
 
I think you should do it...why not?

I'm bringing back a desktop Dino back as an extra computer doing kinda the same thing (adding an SSD drive to boot win 7, RAM) In my case she's an old gaming computer so I'm thinking the unlocked Core quad should be fine.......

Old dell might hold up better in the garage too...new laptops tend to be thinner....
 
Is it usable now while plugged in?

Does it have enough video capability to play movies at a definition your tv would like. 720p at least.
Some older computers with motherboard video play choppy at higher resolutions.

Ram would be first. Should be minimal tinkering, Then sad with a good cloning program.

It won't get much faster than this with a cpu swap. Battery only if you want to unplug it and put it in the car for YouTube videos. Be careful with super cheap batteries. They can catch fire worst case and be way under capacities best case. Look for reviews that are credible. Lots of fake one line reviews around.
 
That's still a very usable PC for internet activity like downloads and YouTube videos. I wouldn't bother with the processor since the one you have is already 64-bit but the rest of your upgrade ideas are exactly what I'd do.
 
Is it usable as-is for your purpose? If yes I'd just spend $35 or less on an SSD and see how it goes and then upgrade if need be.
 
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I have a very similar dell and I did very similar upgrade.

The bottleneck is the graphic card - practically it can not play 1080p videos.
You can test the laptop as it is on high-res videos. If that doesn't work well - the upgrades will not make much difference.
 
I would do the RAM and the SSD only. You don't need a working battery for this application, and the CPU upgrade will be only a marginal improvement.
 
Originally Posted by mk378
I would do the RAM and the SSD only. You don't need a working battery for this application, and the CPU upgrade will be only a marginal improvement.


The cpu upgrade is actually over 50% faster.. but 1.5xslow = slow for sure.

I wouldnt put a penny in it.


@WyrTwister
$29 for this 240GB SSD Plenty of other models around there. kingston around $32
https://www.amazon.com/Pioneer-NAND-Internal-SSD-240/dp/B07H8DX99B/ref=sr_1_2?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1546007959&sr=1-2&refinements=p_n_feature_three_browse-bin%3A14027458011
 
MY $.02- I wouldn't spend a dime on it. I would load it with LInux mint or Ubuntu and carry on. Either Ubuntu or mint would run well on the old hardware in that laptop. I just loaded MINT on an old 2009 ASUS laptop for my mother in-law because she has an insane ability to download viruses using windows. The old laptop is running great now, whereas before with win7 it was a dog.
 
Originally Posted by InhalingBullets
MY $.02- I wouldn't spend a dime on it. I would load it with LInux mint or Ubuntu and carry on. Either Ubuntu or mint would run well on the old hardware in that laptop. I just loaded MINT on an old 2009 ASUS laptop for my mother in-law because she has an insane ability to download viruses using windows. The old laptop is running great now, whereas before with win7 it was a dog.


I would repurpose the laptop with Ubuntu or Mint as well; but given the age of it I would strongly, strongly suggest using the MATE variant of either so you are not suffering with a desktop that requires - but does not have - tonnes of 3D graphics horsepower.
 
Posting on the laptop now....

in the default state, its pretty choppy when playing youtube videos at 1080 and even on 720. 480p was really good. Battery life is sub 20 minutes.

Found out this thing runs on SATA 2. I'm really torn on trying to get this thing up and running nicely or not.

The CPU and RAM upgrade would be trying a SUNK cost. But the SSD HD, i could re-purpose for another PC build. So while i spend $30-50 on a new SSD, it wouldn't be a complete waste.

I know nothing of ubuntu/Mint. Heck i really hate using apple's OS. I had to use them in school and it just didn't jive for me.
 
I think you would find that Mint or Ubuntu is so much like windows you wouldn't notice the difference, particularly when you are basically planning on using it as a browser and video player. In my opinion many LInux distros do a better job of playing video than windows anyway. Since you say you know nothing of Mint or Ubuntu there are some simple tutorials on youtube that would walk you right thru the process of finding the right distro to downloading and loading it on the pc. BTW- "distro" is a short term for variations of LInux based software packages. Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Arch, and Puppy to name a few.
Good luck either way you go.
 
Originally Posted by bowlofturtle


I know nothing of ubuntu/Mint. Heck i really hate using apple's OS. I had to use them in school and it just didn't jive for me.




I guess it's a good think that Mint is NOTHING like apple's OS then

I'd recommend either Mint XFCE or MX Linux on those specs. Mint would be the easiest for a Linux virgin. It will run circles around Windows 7 on that old laptop.
 
I was given a Compaq presairo a900 which is similar to that machine. Put the max amount of memory and a SSD. But I'm running Xubuntu with XFCE. It does everything I need to.. remoting into work via Citrix and whatever my college classes requires. Can watch movies on it with not to high quality. Not sure how it would work with Windows 7 etc. Don't see myself replacing anytime soon. Linux really repurposes old computer for everyday tasks.
 
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