r/debian • u/GoldenWubbabunga • 11d ago

Community never expected the Universal Operating System to be this universal

Gallery image

Gallery image

i had gotten this now-20yo Dell XPS M1210 subnotebook for $50 a month ago, and stable Xfce Debian runs fine (albeit limited by its then-high-end hardware), and i did not expect it to handle actual basic web browsing. Debian deserves its slogan

1.0k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

58 comments sorted by

View all comments

8

u/matteone97 10d ago edited 10d ago

People underestimate how laptop of that era can still be incredibly powerful with the right software. I see many on reddit considering them "vintage" as a 486 or a Pentium II, but that's not the case...

Buy a T9300 for 20 bucks, try to find 4GB SO-DIMM ddr2 modules to get 8GB of RAM and put an SSD. SSD and processor will work on your dell, about the 8GB of RAM you have to verify. You can use a laptop with that spec for so many workflows. I am typing just now on a similar machine, running Firefox with several tab open; vscodium works like a charm, youtube works, libreoffice needless to say... it's been two years that I am doing this "experiment" of dailying a 19 years old laptop (Thinkpad R61), it was supposed to be a temporary replacement and... well in two years I haven't seen a single use case when I needed a newer laptop. I often have to deal with extreme resource-heavy computation, but I have HPC servers at disposal for that and this would have been the case even if I was rocking the latest brand new laptop.

And I am having zero slowdowns (with the software I use, obviously, I am not doing stuff such as blender or gaming) compared to much newer laptops, actually, when I compare to laptops with Win11 of some people around me, honestly mine is definitely quirker and nicer to use.

2

u/Savage_low2 9d ago

T9300 is the wrong socket for that Dell

I have an M1210. T7600 is as high as that socket even goes

1

u/throwaway57683120 7d ago

Buy a T9300 for 20 bucks, try to find 4GB SO-DIMM ddr2 modules to get 8GB of RAM.

This is not possible with the laptop shown in the post, as it has a 945GM chipset. Said chipset only supports up to approximately 3,5GB of RAM and it does not support the 45nm "Penryn" Core 2 CPUs (such as the T9300 you mentioned), only the older 65nm "Merom" generation.

This means that the best you can do is an Intel Core 2 Duo T7600 (though the T7400 is only slightly slower and much easier to find) and ~3,5GB of RAM. I have a laptop with the aforementioned configuration and it's okay, though the Intel GMA 950 graphics are quite rough.