Looking to repurpose an old Dell Inspiron 7559 laptop, i7 6700hq, 8gb ram with either Mint or Ubuntu, perhaps a legacy version? Not looking for anything fancy, just something reasonably user friendly and light weight for basic tasks. Primary use will be reddit / youtube and the occasional grocery list.
Alternatively, would swapping in a SATA ssd make sense with hardware this age? My primary complaint is running slowly on a fresh windows 10 install. Unit is in good shape otherwise. Thanks
-edited to add SSD
If it’s using spinning rust as its internal drive, an upgrade to a SATA SSD will bump the performance meaningfully. I did something similar on an old sandy bridge laptop (dell latitude e6420 xfr) a couple of years ago for a shop laptop, and it has been running fine on the current ubuntu LTS for a similar workload - yours should be quicker
there is an m.2 port on that model so upgrading will be night & day & you don’t have to go expensive either, there’s plenty of cheapie ssd’s that will make your old drive look like its standing still!
I was going to suggest debian & then change the DE to LXDE for a more light weight feel, though i think you could even get away with PopOS with that 8GB (and upgrading your storage ofc!) though ddr3 & that clock, hmmm maybe not.
the nvidia 960M inside the inspiron should be more than okay for what you wanna do and like you said, you just want something to do basic browsing & stuff with so mint would probably be a better choice for you, even better depending on what DE you choose & will feel much, much more zippy than your current setup trying to run windows
way to go! re-purposing old tech instead of throwing it away is always awesome to see!
On my old laptop with an i5 2340m, I tried Ubuntu 22.04 (latest) and Ubuntu 14.04. Turn out there are not many differences in terms of speed, both feel smooth and snappy. Window on the other hand is not as smooth and gets slower over time I’m not sure why.
At the end of the day, I end up with Ubuntu 22.04.
A SATA SSD will boot your experience a lot, if you are about to get one, second-hand Samsung SSD is a solid choice.
