Resurrecting the Behemoth
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay
I am writing this blog on a laptop from 2006, running an operating system that was released in 2021: Linux Mint 20.1. I have been using PC:s since 1995 and I remember the “good old days” in the second half of the 1990’s. You bought a high-end PC for a small fortune and it would last a year or two until it became an unusable brick, at least with regards to gaming. The performance increases with each generation was extreme back then. But in the late noughties, things began to change with the release of multi-core processors, hyperthreading and 64 bit support. The growth has continued for sure, and Moore’s law implies the growth is exponential. But with regards to the user experience, to me it seems like the computers got fast enough to run most important software, even when they got old. It’s as if the hardware improvements grew much faster than the system requirements of software. I mean the kind of software that you need to have a basic computing experience and not the latest games or special applications.
This laptop that I am writing on right now was a Behemoth when it was released. It was the best laptop on the planet. A Dell XPS m1710 with fully maxed out specs. The price back then including the upgrades was easily more than 4000 EUR. It’s running a Core 2 Duo 2,33 GHz, 4 Gb Ram, SSD, GeForce 7950 GTX on a wonderful 17” screen and most important of all, it’s got customizable RGB, way ahead of its time. It weighs just below 5 kg including the power supply, which is great if you want to travel light and leave everything else in your carry-on luggage. As the CPU is 64 bit and dual core, it is still capable of running modern operating systems. I even used this computer with Windows 10 up until 2017 (version 16), but that was the end of the road running windows. They scrapped driver support for some devices so I can’t update it further. I also noticed that basic usage like web browsing and watching YouTube videos, even just looking at the Windows desktop, would firmly park the CPU utilization at 100% with the fans running at full speed and the RAM memory filled to the brim. So that was the end of the road. Or was it?
The computer has since then been lying unused in a computer bag, collecting dust until 2021. But I couldn’t throw away this old brick, considering that it is one of the most expensive things I have ever bought. So I kept it. A while ago, I started reading about old retro computers and vintage hardware, and this dusty old Behemoth came to my mind. Tonight, I decided to fire her up once again and see if there was any life left. Windows 10 booted just fine, but then I remembered how awful the experience was. It is clearly not a lightweight OS. I have been playing around with Linux a little, trying out various distributions for fun and I really like Linux Mint. I guess it is because it feels very familiar if you are a Windows user. So I downloaded the latest release of Mint to a USB stick and booted. Here’s a wonderful thing about Linux: You don’t even have to install the operating system! You can just run it “live” from the USB stick and try it out. The full experience. And for an old PC dinosaur like myself, it never ceases to amaze me just how great Linux is. It is by far the most user friendly OS I have tried. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING just works. No driver installations, no configurations, you just plug in the USB stick and you are set.
I am now running a YouTube video in the background, listening to some music while writing, and the CPU usage is around 9-10 %, using less than 2 Gb of RAM. My printer installed itself, all my little hotkeys on the laptop (play/pause/volume etc) works out of the box and the system feels very responsive. The touch pad now even has some kind of multi-touch features for scrolling web pages, just like a modern computer. I don’t remember ever having that functionality in Windows. And best of all, I am running Linux Mint 20.1 Cinnamon, which is the “high-end” version of the OS with all the bells and whistles, and graphical candy. There are other Linux versions which are even more light-weight, which can bring life back to even more ancient hardware than my old laptop. Linux is also 100 % free. I love open source!
If you got some old computer ready for the dumpster, perhaps you can think again and give Linux a shot? It’s fun to try something different and get a fresh perspective!