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A comment on Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs. Parent comment

Re:Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs by Klinky on Monday December 26, 2016 @03:34PM (#13259647)
This should definitely be investigated before investing time getting an alternative OS up and running, along with the troubleshooting and training that comes with it.

Upgrade to the latest CPU for the platform. For $25 you could gain an extra 1+ Ghz or more cores.

Max out ram, for DDR2 systems this is usually 4GB - 8GB. 2GB sticks can easily be had for under $10 a stick.

Replace hard drive with SSD. Especially if it's a low RPM hard drive. 128GB SSDs can be had for $35 on sale.

The above upgrades will easily boost performance whatever OS is already running on the hardware, and total time to install should be 1 - 2 hours.

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Re:Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs by jlgaddis on Monday December 26, 2016 @04:48PM (#13259938)
There are a lot of very respectable laptops available (off-lease and such) for relatively cheap.

I picked up a ThinkPad T420 a few months ago on eBay for, IIRC, $180. For $250 all in, I had a nice i5 laptop w/ 16 GB of RAM and a 120 GB SSD. I didn't need it and don't really use it for anything but it's great when I need a spare or somebody else wants to use it. It could easily serve as a great primary machine for an average user (i.e. e-mail and Facebook / web browsing), though.

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Re:Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs by perryh2 on Monday December 26, 2016 @08:26PM (#13260709)
I bought a T420 from Ebay as well for around $180. Everything works well but the screen on my sucked. Did you replace yours?
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Re:Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs by jlgaddis on Monday December 26, 2016 @09:10PM (#13260850)
Nope, it was in great condition.
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Re:Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs by yuhong on Monday December 26, 2016 @04:20PM (#13259817)
The SSD as a boot drive will require an OS reinstall anyway though.
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Re:Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs by anonbanker on Monday December 26, 2016 @05:07PM (#13260036)
dd if=/dev/originaldevice of=/dev/newdevice

Unless the system is too old to contain new drivers, or you're switching from x86 to arm, you shouldn't have a problem. I've done this multiple times, including a gradual upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 to 16.04.

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Re:Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs by copperx on Monday December 26, 2016 @04:44PM (#13259915)
Not really. I usually just image the boot drive.
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