Repurposing

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I live in the UK and, amongst a myriad of other devices, have an Acer Aspire One netbook.

It came with Windows XP but was immediately upgraded for free to Windows 7. Subsequently I upgraded it to Windows 10, again for free… and then to Linux Mint.

It’s old now (~7 years) but has served me so well. I bought it to take on holiday so I could remote into my work and home PCs. It’s performed flawlessly despite how well travelled it is (UK, Germany, Spain, Morocco)… but it’s based on an Atom processor so isn’t the fastest. No matter… it’s done its job amazingly well.

I repurposed it over a year ago to a (Linux-based) media server (using its built in SD card slot as a media source). I must admit that it’s performed flawlessly… but time marches on.

I’m about to replace my current last remaining 10-yr-old Windows 7 desktop PC with a replacement better-specified (refurbished, only 5-yr-old) Win 10 PC, which will be on 24/7 and – as part of its duties – will become my replacement media server of choice.

As a result, my wonderful Acer Aspire One netbook is surplus to requirements.

Does anyone want it for free, but just repay the cost of secure postage? It’s in amazing condition. I never even removed the shipping film on the clamshell top cover.

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DrBonzo, cyberSAR

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These are handy little netbooks on-the-go with good battery life, got one myself with 2Gb Ram (upgraded) and an SSD. Once a minimalist distro is on there (LXQT/LXDE), they run quite well for anyone wishing to dabble with linux.

Keeping IT Lean, Clean and Mean!

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I agree. I’ve got an old Gateway netbook with the same specs as Rick Corbett’s (see below). It was my guinea pig machine for Win 7 patching. Now, it’s dual booting Win 7 and Mint 19.2 Cinnamon 64 bit. Small, lightweight, good battery life. It’s no speed demon, although booting up and initial program loading are the bottlenecks on Mint. Once a browser gets loaded in, it’s really quite functional.

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I don’t know of a Linux equivalent to Speccy so I re-imaged it back to Windows 10… and realised that the last time it ran Windows was Windows 10 Home 1511 x32. How long ago was that? And it was the full version, complete with all the autostarting bloatware running in the background. Boy, have I learned a lot since.

However, it was enough to grab more specs:

Acer Aspire One D250-0Bb
Intel Atom N270 @ 1.60GHz
1GB RAM
500GB Seagate ST9500325AS (SATA)

If anyone wants it then I’ll do a clean install to bring it as up-to-date as possible, probably using a ‘Win 10 Debloat’ script to remove all the built-in mostly-useless nonsense to make it run as efficiently as possible (although I appear to still have Win 7 and even Win XP images for it).

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Rick Corbett wrote:
the last time it ran Windows was Windows 10 Home 1511 x32

more specs:
Acer Aspire One D250-0Bb
Intel Atom N270 @ 1.60GHz
1GB RAM

With only 1GB RAM, with WinXP and Win7 EOL, and with even 32-bit Win10 going away, seems like your best solution would be to just (re)install a light(er)-weight Linux distro on it (for example, maybe Mint-XFCE?)…

In other words, after “upgrading” to Win10, perhaps there were good reasons you then chose to install a different OS on the netbook?

Hope this helps.

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The equivalent or closest to speccy in linux that I have used for years is a command line interface program called ‘inxi’ available in debian/ubuntu repo’s via synaptic. (it may be already on your system if your distro is based on these)
It’s small with a few samll dependancies that provides a full description of the host device.
Has many switches but, the one to use is:
inxi -Fz : provides all the sanitized info required for a device.

Keeping IT Lean, Clean and Mean!

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Rick Corbett

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Microfix wrote:

The equivalent or closest to speccy in linux that I have used for years is a command line interface program called ‘inxi’

Many thanks for the info. I had already re-imaged back to Windows 10 but I’ve made a note to have a look at/use ‘inxi’ in future.

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Just wanted to say kudos to Rick for his offer. We need more people like this in the world!

Never Say Never

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Rick Corbett

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FWIW, I have an old, refurbished Dell Latitude 2120 netbook with similar specs that I bought 3 years ago ($85CAN) just to experiment with different OSes.

It came with Windows 10 Home, but I’ve replaced that with multiple Linux distros and found that it handled most of them exceptionally well.

In particular, it ran very well when loaded with Neverware’s CloudReady ChromeOS clone, which effectively turned it into a Chromebook and very useful for anyone with limited online needs.

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