I managed to snag a freebie – a free laptop that was left next to the dumpster.
It’s nothing special, really, but it’s a freebie, so I can’t really complain about its condition or ‘completeness’. Let’s see if it still works after someone left it to rot away on the landfill.
Mmmm…
Privacy.
It’s an ASUS manufactured PC, 17″ screen, and anything that was easily stealable was stolen. I really hope that after I install my RAM stick it will just work.
BUT before I power it on I will disassemble it.
Nothing special so far, no damage as far as I can see.
I must say, disassembly of this laptop was a must in a long run- thermal paste turned into the consistency of a not-so-thermal rock. While I’m at it I looked up specs of this laptop and… it’s bad. A single core AMD CPU that performs like 40% of a C2D based laptop and a GPU that likely only is there because the CPU doesn’t have an integrated one. The fact that somebody stole the HDD and RAM from it doesn’t help much.
Again, it’s a freebie, so no complaining, becasuse gods of freebies might hear me and not give me another one 🙂
And the next day it was ready to test, equipped with my sacrificial HDD and spare RAM stick.
It works!
However, equipped with Ubuntu on board it’s slow. Very slow. Just running an apt update is enough to pin the CPU to 100% utilization.
How about Zorin 16 Lite live OS then? It’s more packed with features than Ubuntu, while also being a bit easier to run.
I mean it works better. Not great, but usable – I even managed to install neofetch and use lm-sensors. Runs toasty, but within limits. It’s whisper quiet though.
At this point I don’t have a use for this laptop, but I’m sure I will find one later. Maybe a Minecraft server or a pfSense firewall?
Thanks for reading!