Giving a 10 year old laptop a new life

crwdns2853023:0crwdne2853023:0

We have an old Asus laptop at home - it's from 2013. And since we are Mac users - we didn't really use that one much, but at some point I decided to play some old Windows games and get more practice with Linux, so why not give this machine a small upgrade?

crwdns2853024:0crwdne2853024:0

At first I replaced one of the HDDs with an SSD - my god that made it fly! Windows 10 just screams through the air and this Asus boots just half a second later than my latest MacBook Pro!

Then at some point I realised that in order to download and install even those old games I need a faster WiFi plus my gaming mouse won't connect. This laptop - again - it's from 2013 - had a 2.4 Ghz 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.

And the coolest thing about those laptops is that everything is modular - I just ordered a replacement WiFi 6e card for like 20$ and installed it - and Windows 10 automatically provided a driver for it just like an Ubuntu 23.10 - latest Ubuntu Linux distribution that has just been released!

Now this thing also flies through the interned at the ~700 MiBit/s speeds it never hoped for 🙌

crwdns2853025:0crwdne2853025:0

I wish upgrading and repairing was as easy with every single device we use nowadays - hope we're moving in that direction.