Breathe New Life Into An Old Laptop

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, laptops have become the de facto tool in the WFH (Work From Home) environment. They are the reason many companies have been able to weather the seemingly never ending lockdowns that have been enforced. But this has had a knock-on effect for the personal computing sector.

The exponential increase in demand has caused a shortage of such machines and resulted in their prices skyrocketing by astronomical proportions. This is why it would be more financially responsible to keep your current machine going or revive an older one that doesn’t get much use anymore. Old laptops can be given new life with a few key upgrades.

Upgrade to SSD
Most older machines have mechanical hard drives. They are clunky, heavy and downright slow. Many manufacturers have stopped installing them in newer laptops that have been built in in the last couple of years. Solid State Drives (SSD) do not have platters or other moving parts. Instead they use flash memory, which is similar in principle to that use by your pen drive.

They are significantly faster than mechanical hard drives, which will result in quicker boot times and an all-round more responsive computing experience. Upgrading to an SSD is fairly simple. You just have to remove a few screws on the bottom of your laptop, remove the old drive and replace it with an SSD. The connectors and brackets are interchangeable between them.

Add RAM
Most older laptops have empty RAM slots. This is done to allow for further expansion later on. Newer version of Windows require more than 4GB of RAM to function well. Having a total capacity of 8GB RAM is the sweet spot. This, coupled with a fast SSD will make old laptops as quick as brand new ones. The transformation is nothing short of amazing.

But before you upgrade your RAM, make sure that your operating system supports it. Older laptops were installed with 32-bit Windows Operating systems, not 64-bit. This prevents them from utilizing more than 4GB RAM. If you’re unsure, check your system preferences in Windows Explorer.

Mechanical Drive: Photo by Aza Bo from Pexels

Clean The Fan
Over time, dust and debris build up within your laptop’s cooling system. This bogs down the fan’s effectiveness and reduces the efficiency of its heatsink. Insufficient cooling, will cause your machine to run hotter than normal. Modern processors are built with safeguards that prevent overheating. This includes throttling performance until it cools down.

This can cause older machine to run slowly, even when nothing is going on, in the background. That is why, you should make it a practice to open the casing and clean your fan at least once a year. This will lengthen your laptop’s lifespan and keep it running efficiently.

Change The Operating System
It’s not for the faint of heart, but migrating to a lightweight operating system can breath new life into an older laptop. Believe it or not, Windows 10 isn’t the zippy and efficient OS Microsoft’s marketing department will have you believe. It’s a modern operating system that requires modern hardware to keep it happy.

Now, moving to lightweight Linux installations will improve performance significantly. Running an OS like LXLE, Lubuntu or Linux Mint on older laptops can make a world of difference. They are built to use the least amount of resources as possible. Take a look at their support pages to learn more.